Recent Changes to PSU’s Digital Accessibility Standards

Portland State University’s Digital Accessibility Policy establishes the requirement that all public-facing digital resources be accessible to people with disabilities. The Office of Information Technology’s standards for Accessible Digital Design and Accessible Digital Procurement support this Policy by defining the associated industry guidelines and best practices we must follow.

Those industry guidelines have just undergone some changes! The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recently updated their Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) from Version 2.1 to Version 2.2. OIT in turn has updated our two standards that reference WCAG to stay in conformance with this update. Both the Standard for Accessible Digital Design and Standard for Accessible Digital Procurement have been updated to reference WCAG 2.2.  

What Does This Mean for You?

WCAG 2.2 builds on existing guidelines with the addition of six new Level A and AA success criteria. (These are the levels of success criteria to which PSU is accountable per OIT’s standards for Accessible Digital Design and Accessible Digital Procurement.) These additional success criteria make implicit cognitive accessibility best practices more explicit, further establishing the spirit and intention of existing WCAG guidelines.

The following are the new success criteria that affect your work with public-facing digital resources at PSU:

• Success Criterion 2.4.11
  • Ensure that when an element on screen gets keyboard focus, it is at least partially visible.
• Success Criterion 2.5.7
  • If an element on screen can be moved by dragging, ensure that it is also movable using an alternate method.
• Success Criterion 2.5.8
  • Ensure that all buttons and interactive elements on screen meet minimum size requirements.
• Success Criterion 3.2.6
  • Ensure that help information appears in the same relative location on all web pages.
• Success Criterion 3.3.7
  • Ensure that information in forms must only be entered once. Duplicate entries should be auto-filled.
• Success Criterion 3.3.8
  • Ensure that end users are never required to solve, recall, or transcribe something to log in.

For more information regarding the differences between WCAG 2.1 and WCAG 2.2, please reference the W3C’s article on What’s New in WCAG 2.2! We also encourage you to also check out the Digital Accessibility Support resources we maintain in the PSU Help Center for PSU employees.