Emerge Interactive has committed to itself to raising the bar on web accessibility by adopting a company-wide accessibility policy, educating clients and stakeholders, engaging with the web development community through talks at meetups and code schools, producing accessible experiences, writing about the topic, and even starting open source projects.

Today we are very excited to announce the next step in our quest to make the web more accessible by launching the WCAG Accessibility Checklist app. Our goal is to bridge the gap between the WCAG 2.0 guidelines and web professionals, clients, and key stakeholders.

The WCAG Accessibility Checklist is a free iOS and Android app that will allow a user to self-audit a website or app’s accessibility health in a fun and intuitive way. The app is an interactive checklist of the W3C WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 2.0.

What is WCAG 2.0?

The WCAG 2.0 guidelines, created by the W3C are industry standards that consist of recommendations for making digital experiences more accessible. The problem with these wall-of-text guidelines is that they are geared more towards browser manufacturers and less towards the average web professional or website owner.

Fortunately Luke McGrath has taken each WCAG 2.0 guideline and translated its content into a much more understandable format. The content found at his Wuhcag 2.0 Checklist website was a huge inspiration for us. With his permission we created the wuhcag-json project, which is an open source project that combines all of the Wuhcag 2.0 Checklist content along with the actual W3C WCAG 2.0 guidelines content in JSON format.

The overall goal was to make this awesome content more portable, translatable, and useable. This content feeds the WCAG Accessibility Checklist app and we are very thankful for Luke’s contribution. To learn more about Luke’s work we recommend listening to his episode on The Web Ahead.

Where to find the app

You can learn more about the app on the WCAG Accessibility Checklist website, or download it directly from the iOS App Store or Google Play.