In 2020, we said we were going to double down on accessibility, and we’ve made some great strides since then—and it’s getting noticed!
Originally our goal was to reach WCAG 2.1 AA compliance in Craft 4.0. We weren’t able to meet that target, but we want to be fully transparent about where we are in our journey to make Craft accessible.
We’ve just released our official Accessibility Conformance Report for Craft 4.0, specifically for content authoring screens. This report explains to what degree Craft CMS meets each Success Criterion in the WCAG 2.1 standard.
Preparing for the report
Performing the audit
Before creating our report, we needed to get a comprehensive picture of Craft’s accessibility. To do that, we performed a full WCAG 2.1 A/AA audit of the CMS screens and components specific to content authors. In doing so, we created a list of actionable accessibility bug tickets categorized by WCAG success criteria.
Choosing a reporting format
We chose to use the ITI VPAT® template to create our report. Developed by the Information Technology Industry Council, the ITI VPAT® is the leading global reporting format for communicating the accessibility features of IT products and services.
VPAT stands for “Voluntary Product Accessibility Template.” When a company fills out a VPAT, the end result is an Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR). Because we’re using this widely-used format, you’ll be able to put our ACR side-by-side with any other CMS’s ACR to determine which product best meets your accessibility needs.
How to read the report
At the top of the ACR, you can find information about the product version number it relates to. This ACR is specific to the 4.0.0 version released on May 4, 2022.
To learn what parts of the CMS were tested and how they were tested, you can read the sections titled Notes and Evaluation Methods Used.
The table that follows lists all of the success criteria belonging to WCAG 2.1 A/AA. For each success criterion, you’ll see a discrete conformance level: Supports, Partially Supports, and Does Not Support. Here’s how you should interpret those levels:
- Supports means that the CMS functionality can be met without any known defects
- Partially Supports means that some CMS functionality does not meet the criterion
- Does Not Support means the majority of the CMS functionality does not meet the criterion
Each conformance result is followed by a remarks and explanations section.
If we’ve met the criterion completely, we’ll explain how we met it or why it doesn’t apply. If we weren’t able to meet the criterion, we’ve included bug ID numbers for all known issues that affect usability. If we know of a workaround for the issue, we’ve made note of it immediately following the issue description.
Next steps
We’re more committed to accessibility than ever. We’re using everything we’ve learned while auditing and writing our ACR as a basis for planning high-impact remediation sprints, and for understanding where we need to improve at an organizational level.
Right now, the report is based on an audit of authoring screens. Once we complete an audit of administrative screens, we’ll update the report to reflect any new findings. We also plan to release an ACR alongside each major release.
We’ve made a ton of accessibility progress in Craft 3 and 4, but there’s still plenty of work to be done. We plan to keep shipping accessibility improvements with every release. And with all issues neatly tracked and sorted according to severity, we can better organize our remediation efforts with an eye toward user impact.