Live Session – Part 1 (2026-27)

Welcome to this first week with me. And just a little bit of structural how this usually works when I do them. So the first thing we do and we're going to do this today as well, is that I'm going to ask you about like any open questions about the videos that you've watched.

Anything that you think you want to bring up that was difficult to understand. anything structurally, anything where you go like, oh, but I have a specific question about X, Y, and Z. And then you can -- so that will be like the first couple of minutes. And then we will like move towards like demonstrations and more explanations about the stuff that you've heard in the videos.

But trying to make it more practical. This first week, because Because it's all WCAG theory, right? It's going to be like a little bit all over the place.

And don't feel like, oh, I don't understand something right now. I have all the questions. Like a lot of the things we're going to go over slowly in the coming weeks, right?

This is more like giving you the impression of like everything. And then like allowing you to like dig deep into more stuff later on. So yeah.

Don't feel too scared. I mean, it's October. So maybe you want to feel scared.

But don't feel too scared to like to say, oh, I don't understand that. Or like what can we do about that? Yeah.

And I said that before starting the recording. If you don't want your image in the recording, you have to switch your cameras off. Because otherwise they're going to, like, continuously record you and put you in the video.

Which is a weird decision on the part of the thing. So whenever you don't want to be in the video, you have to switch your camera off. Yeah.

And now opening it up, like, any questions about the video, anything that, like, was difficult to understand or you have you want to ask me questions about. That would be the first step. And feel free to raise your hand.

Especially if someone else is already speaking. And you can also put your questions into the chat, of course. Like there's no, you know, you don't have to speak up or like show your face or your voice or whatever.

We're chill here. communications way is okay. Also if you have not seen the videos because you've been busy or anything like that, that's also totally understandable.

And we don't hold that against you. All right. Giving you another minute to think of questions.

And if not, I'm going to show a little bit stuff. And then, you know, So whenever you have questions, raise your hand or, you know, just yell at me. That's also fine.

I'm used to it. All right. No questions.

I guess that's good. Because like I know it's pretty overwhelming. And so that's the expected thing that I would imagine.

So, you should be seeing my screen and especially my browser in this case. And I want to highlight one thing that I have not had time to keep up yet this year. Or this semester, whatever you want to call it.

That is the Chars transcripts page which is on my website. And I will paste the link into the chat. And this is where you will find transcripts of all the weeks that I have -- that I am involved with.

And the goal is on one hand to make it more accessible. Because for some people reading is easier. But these are AI LLM created captions.

I mean, I review them like very high level for like not being like too bad. But they're also not like super good. And especially they did sometimes, you know, just break in the middle of the sentence and stuff like that.

I don't, yeah, I'm not, you know, I would love to pay people to do these. But we don't have that funding for these. But at least what you can use them for is to find, you know, your place in the videos.

Or if you want to, like, review something, you can just use your browser search and search for let's say, oh, it has a lot of WAI. So you see that WAI is here. And then you can reread what's going on there.

And it's like a good way to say like, oh, I think I missed this. Or like, what was this? This detail and, you know, a little bit of the, like, context can get that from the transcript really easily.

And you don't have to wait through a whole video. Because yeah, videos are not the best way to do this. And you can also show the time stamps.

And then you get the time stamps here. And for the WAI bit. You see that's in five minutes 36 seconds and 639 minutes seconds.

So five minutes 48 seconds. Almost 49 seconds. And then you can, like, you know, find the place in the video if you think, like, oh, this transcript doesn't, like, completely cover it.

But yeah. I think that's a good learning tool. And again, I haven't gotten into, like, updating it yet for you all.

Usually try to do that before my first session. But once we get this recording and I get it to the to my computer and get it transcribed, I will update the site and then you will have these live session links will say live session 2026, 2027. And if you want to look at the previous year's live sessions, you can look at those too.

But you don't have access to those videos. So don't know if they're super useful for you. Yeah.

Just wanted to let you know that I try to have those and update those. And yeah, for the prerecorded videos, of course, they are there already. So that can be a good way to, like, figure stuff out.

Any questions about that? Probably not. Because it's pretty self-explanatory.

And I will also try to like put the links to the different weeks into the materials. But I didn't want to do that before I was ready. So you know how it is.

Then the other thing I want to talk about a little bit, like basically catching up from the videos is the EN 301549. There is a new version and there were already questions about it. From like the video that I did, nothing has changed really.

Like the changes have all been very in the details and it's a very like broad, like overlooking video. So I don't think there's anything in particular that you need to look at. But there have been a few changes and this is a slide that my colleague Eric did.

And he was like, hey, you can show them this. Very grateful to do that. And that is that user preferences which was before only for software has now made it into web and documents.

And there are a little bit of softening this. So for user preferences in software, you basically have to support it. And then on the web and for documents, they are like, oh, you should support it.

So it's like a little bit less in depth. And that's I think that's a good change. I think that's much more practical compared to what we usually had in, you know, before.

Yeah. It's not a big change. The biggest change is that they put WCAG 2.2 in there.

And we teach you WCAG 2.2 anyway. So you know, don't, you don't even have like for the core stuff, for the end, you don't even have to learn new stuff from what we're doing for you. It's all like in the details.

And details that usually doesn't really matter to most people looking at these standards. Yeah. And then for document accessibility features, you cannot disrupt the accessibility features.

That feels like something that is, yeah, that we would expect for sure. But now it's like in there in details. And that's a good change for sure.

Because like, you know, some people try to break stuff all the time. And then there are like a couple of other changes. Like in functional performance criteria, authoring tools, realtime bidirectional communications, about products and services and about conformance.

So you have a little bit of changes in there. I personally have not looked at those in detail because it just came out, I want to say six weeks ago and hasn't been properly published in the European journal. When it's like, you know, technically law and then it also has to go to all the European And be implemented there.

There's a lot of time until we have to look in detail for these requirements. And then we probably do that, you know, during our work. You know, while we're working on it.

We're looking at them and say, hey, this has changed. What's going on? Doesn't super help that it's a PDF document and you cannot really compare them.

If I have WCAG, you know, I can show you this. There is the services.org/htmldiffservice. I think that's right.

WCAG way team member brain knows URLs from that. And there you can put in like WCAG 2.2. Which is the new document.

And then you have WCAG 2.1. Which is the reference document. And then you click on get diff.

And you get all the changes. In a like really nice view. And you see that it's not a lot.

Like all these things on the left. But it doesn't have any new things. Those have not changed.

Right? like a lot, a lot, a lot of things that have not changed. Like of course, new features in WCAG 2.2 is different than new features in WCAG 2.1.

You would expect that, but then if you go to the success criteria, right? You'll see that like the old success criteria, nothing has changed in those. Here, there are two new nodes.

Here are two new nodes. Here there's a little bit of change. But it's all like very semantic until you get to the new success criteria.

Which come here. And then there are like basically whole new. So that's also why if you look at WCAG 2.1 or WCAG 2.2 it doesn't make a lot of difference.

Because there are only like I think six new success criteria or four or five on level AA. And so it's not -- yeah. It's not too bad.

Yeah. And then there have been like minimal changes here. Right?

So it's really, really fun to use these diff tools. But you cannot do that in a PDF. in a PDF, it just doesn't work because like PDFs are not real text, right?

So well, they are real text these days. But like you can't like if they break into another page, how do you compare that? All of that jazz.

Usually not worth it. And difficult to do. But yeah, this is basically how you can compare really easily.

And I think visually and content wise really nicely to web pages. And this works for every web page. Not only W3C web pages.

But yeah. It's one of these secret tools that you now have access to. So I'm going to make it 2.1 versus make it 2.2.

There we go. And then, yeah, you can just remove like the things here and you get the HTML. I think it's really good.

So I like that. Yeah, but we don't have that for EN 301549 and that's like one of the big things why it makes it so hard to like learn and give you, you know, and package it together as an update for this course even. Because like it basically means making one PDF on the left and one PDF, open it on the And then comparing like almost every line, right?

And that's like not something you want to do. There is in the PDF, which I have here. Let me share this with you.

I try to make it a little bit smaller so you have larger text. So I probably should have just opened it in the browser because I'm already sharing that. And I know that Hampus had like a bad experience with sharing stuff and then unsharing stuff.

Let's go EN, there we go. And there is a changes thing in there. Where did I find that?

I think it's an F forward. So it basically says the significant changes are the requirements related to realtime text have been significantly revised and extended. The requirements of 9, 10 and 11 have all been updated to align with WCAG 2.2.

Which is like, yeah. Great. There's the new annex set A. And set B. And then there's another new clause.

But these are not by far not all the things that have changed. So it's like it's nice that they have this. But yeah.

I wish there was more. More better documentation about the changes. Well.

It is what it is. Yeah, I don't think in the video I showed WCAG 1.0 in detail. I just want to like get you on the memory lane here a little bit.

But it's not a memory, it's not your memory. So maybe it's like, you know, look at history. Because this is now 26 years old, right?

And yeah, and if you look at like how it's set up and how it's structured, it's very different than Recag 2.2. Which is quite fascinating, to be honest. And especially if you look at the guidance, right?

very, very close to like what you have to do in HTML to make it accessible. And the reality is that like WCAG 2.2 or 2, WCAG 2, first and foremost, is so successful because it is so adaptable to other technology as well, right? It also worked for Flash, which was a thing like 10 years ago.

It also works for, you know, complex JavaScript. It also works for, you know, mobile apps in like the broad strokes. Like that's -- it just makes it so successful.

And you know, in Recache 1, basically had like image and input and applet elements. And then that you're using the alt for the image. It doesn't even say alt attribute.

Like, you know, it's also didn't have, like, very good language for describing these things. Yeah. Then provide redundant text links for each active region of a server side image map.

That's very specific. I don't even know if any server side, probably PHP supports it. But server side image maps were a thing where you basically clicked on an image and then it sent the coordinates where you clicked on back to the server and the server knew where to go based on the coordinates of the image that you clicked.

Like very weird technology. You shouldn't do that anymore. Yeah.

And other stuff. But also things that we use in WCAG all the time. WCAG 2 all the time.

Don't rely on color alone. Makes a lot of sense. Use markup and style sheets and do so properly.

Which is like, yeah, it's very general. But the checkpoints, you know, making sure that you are using validated documents. Which Recact 2 does not require you to do.

Making sure that the style sheets are correct and control the presentations and stuff like that. So it's very, it's very specific also, right? So when you think about like introducing new elements or new programming languages or anything like that.

This would fall apart like really quickly. And that's the reason why when they published it in 1999, they were like, oh, this is good for now, but we have to move on. Go ahead.

Yeah. So just curious. So this first version, who was it written for? Was it written for, since there was no, it was just recommendations and there was no Was it like everyone working on the internet or kind of

>> Good question. So in general, the W3C makes standards, right? So these standards are called by W3C recommendations.

So they are industry standards. Like think of ISO, think of Etsy and stuff like that. They don't need themselves laws or anything to make them useful.

The idea is that different people from different internet companies, especially in the beginning, come together and say like, how do we best do this? How do we best put an image on a website? And then they develop together the image element and then put that into the standard, which became the HTML recommendation.

And then later that exploded and went away. But that's something for the future probably. But yeah, it's industry standards.

So it's for every player who wants to create a browser and who wants to write websites. That was the initial remit. And so theoretically if you are not accessible, if you don't follow the W3C WCAG 2.2 recommendation at this point, you could say you're doing the internet wrong.

Which is like, that's not useful to say to anyone. Because there's no law against doing that. Or has been for a long time.

But the idea was like, oh, you want to align with these standards to, like, make sure that your content is interoperable and everyone can use it.

>> Just a follow up question on that. did it go from recommendations to kind of who started putting it into law and where in the world and what timeline?

It's a good, again, a good question. So yeah, basically how this works is, or how this started is that there were, and I talk now about mostly accessibility laws and like standards because that's where I'm more comfortable But basically in the US, for example, people sued other companies for being inaccessible. And then the -- what is it called?

The lawyers basically went together before a judge. And the judge was like, okay, you have to prove that you're accessible. How do you do that?

And then one of the ways that they were like, oh, we're following the standard, the industry standard on accessibility. And that made it so that people pointed at it and said, like, oh, this is the inoperable way. This is something that we can assume people can do.

And then often the judge would say, like, oh, you're violating accessibility standards here and there. And we know they are well researched and they're well, like, you know, supported by the industry. So we can assume if you don't meet those standards, then you're failing accessibility.

And then over a longer time, some of the new laws and new regulations point directly at WCAG. And this is how the European accessibility act now works. Is that it basically says, like, to demonstrate that you're accessible, you either have to explain it to us one by one, like every single step you do.

Or you can say we are following the EN standard. And then the EN standard says, like, oh, we think it's basically WCAG 2.2 plus a few extra things. And that's basically how it went.

And yeah. And it took a lot of, like, lobbying and showing and making sure that, like, it works in a legislative way, right? That you can really demonstrate every single requirement and make sure that, like, it gets reasonably well interpreted by everyone.

Yeah. And that basically made it so that WCAG in this case came into, like, being used by lawmakers to create those regulations.

So this document, you showed us the EN 3.014549. Who is that document kind of meant to be read by? Because it's kind of hard to get into the contents of it.

It's, yeah, and I mean, if you ask me as a private citizen, I think this is a terribly written standard. And theoretically everyone who falls under the European accessibility act needs to read it. So every company above 2 million euros and doing consumer contracts or who have ten, I think it's ten employees or more is required to make their websites conform to the European accessibility act and the European accessibility act points at the EN 301549. So basically every company.

>> So they should make the accessibility requirements accessible.

>> I mean, there is, like, broadly I agree. And there is, and I will show this in a bit. Like there is a lot of, especially for the WCAG part of this, there's a lot of explainers and making sure that it's easier to understand.

It is a challenge to make stuff testable and like clear, like pass/fail things. And also make them easy to understand. I mean, if we look at -- and I go to WCAG 2.2, because it's a much better standard than WCAG 2.1.

There open that. It says web page titles have titles that describe topic or purpose. You can probably ask seven people if a page title has describes the topic or purpose and they would all have different opinions around it.

Right? So it is a challenge. This is very simple.

Like If you are testing it, it's not as easy to understand, right? And so, yeah. And some of them have to be, like, pretty complex just because the topic is complex.

Like here we have, like, pause, stop, hide for moving, blinking and scrolling content. And yeah, you could argue these should be two different success criteria. for moving and breaking and scrolling content and one for auto updating content.

But you know, this is all like, this is good, good ideas. And I agree. But yeah, sometimes these are not, yeah, it's just like, what can you, how can you make this so good that nobody criticizes it before it gets published?

And I think I said that in the video. Like W3C's process is completely consensus based. So everyone needs to agree, right?

And that is going to be difficult when you have people from Google and Apple and Microsoft and Meta and I don't know who. And then you have accessibility, you know, people and you have individuals and you have disabled people in there and stuff. And everyone wants something different from the standard.

It might be only a little bit different or it might be very different, right? And in the end, like, at some point you have to make a cut and say, like, this is good enough to publish it. Because otherwise we won't get anything done.

all like we see it right now with what happens with W3C's WCAG 3 project, right? That's going on for a long time and like we don't know when it's going to be done. Could be done in 2030, it could be done in 2032, could be done in never, right?

It's like, it's an open question. That's why I have a really hard time to talk about, like, stuff that is in progress too much. Because I think it's easy for stuff to change, even last minute.

But yeah. That's -- so, yeah. It should be better written.

I agree. I think a lot of, like, of these success criteria would improve with a good editor. But that didn't happen.

And yeah. And this leads very well into the understanding documents. So if you go to the standard, you have here at the top right, and I don't know why these are like, you know, for whatever.

Like these really small text links for understanding and how to meet. But if you click on understanding, you get into these understanding documents. And they have for every success criterion basically an explainer of like what it means, what the different -- yeah, how to look at it and what to do.

They have this in brief section at the top, which I usually recommend to skip, because it's too broad for me. That I think it's not useful. And then you have the success criteria in here.

Just to repeat. And then you have the intent of like what is this supposed to be doing? And I think that's one of the most useful parts of the page.

Then you get the benefits. You get some examples. Then you get related resources.

So you can click on those to get like, you know, third party more information about things. And then you get techniques which are basically examples on how to implement it. And there are often more ways to do it than what's shown in the techniques.

But it's a good way to say like, oh, what should I do? And then you click on to the techniques. And then you have failure techniques which basically just give you like things, show you how it's broken.

So, for this audio and video only, that's actually a bad one for showing this. Let's go to info and relationships which basically says everything that's on the page visually needs to be conveyed in structure or in text. And yeah, it gives you like a really long introduction.

These also should be much clearer and shorter in my opinion. Benefits like text document, then techniques. And you can see that here semantically identifying a font icon with role image, for example.

You can do that. And then we have using caption elements to associate data table captions with data tables. So if you have a table, you can use captions.

And add those. And that's how you meet the success criteria. So they're very much, very specific examples here.

And yeah. And this is a good way to learn more about those. I see there's a question in the chat.

Can you somehow upload the transcripts page on the course side? The one that's on my side? No, I cannot.

Like that's unfortunately not. But I will link it from next to the video. So we'll be able to get that.

It's going to be like in the videos, in the video comments or something when they...

Yeah, there will be a link there. Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, it's just like it falls out of my caption software as it is and then I can just upload it and it's done. So I don't have to like copy and paste and reform it because like the Kajabi interface is not good for it. And what we had before was also not really good for it.

But I I try to make sure that you have that. And it's also like in the captions that you have on the those will be the same captions as they are on the site. So I don't know if there's a viewer for those.

That's basically the course material. Or how is that different than the course material that's already uploaded on the course page?

I think now I'm confused. So are you talking about this?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. So this is the same things that is uploaded. It's just a text form instead of video with captions. It's the text of the captions as just to read and search. So you don't, you know, you don't have to use it, but it's there for, yeah, if you need it or want to use it.

>> Yeah. So you can.

>> Yeah. And I will put the links in the appropriate places. It will be very, well, I hope it will be easy to find the, the Kajabi interface is not super clear on that.

I mean, if you open, oh, where can I open this? This is our backend, by the way, so you can see how this looks. Let's say I open this here.

I will try to put it on the right side here and basically give you a link then. Maybe it's downloads, maybe it's over here in the text, but yeah, you should find it. Maybe I put a nice emoji in front of it so it's easier to find.

It would have been nice for us to take notes inside every module, but I guess that's not possible to.

I don't think so, I don't think so. I think this is just for putting stuff in front of your faces. There is the functionality to have, what is it called, comments.

I don't think they are super useful. And we're actually discussing to deactivating them. So we have everything in the community instead.

Because I think that makes more sense instead of having like a lot of comments on different was right. But yeah, I don't know. So yeah, I don't know if you can make notes for yourself.

I would be surprised.

Yeah.

But you have to like, the best is to ask in the community and see what the people from Charles have to say about that because like we have no influence in what platform we're using.

Yeah. And the community is not in the course. It's like outside of the course structure or? Because I wasn't, I'm not finding any community like contact.

So if you go to, oh, I don't, how do we get there? So here at the top right, you should see Chess Academy community. And then if you click on that, it goes to the Chess Academy site for me, but that might only be because I'm not a real student.

But I think that's how you get to that. Let me know if it doesn't, and then I can give that feedback to the people of Chess. And shake my fist and say like, hey, this used to work.

All right. What else do I want to show? Yeah.

I talked a little bit about the techniques. I don't want to go too deep into those. I want to show you the how to meet WCAG quick reference.

Because that is a way to -- okay. It's the same for Michaela for when she clicks the community button. Okay.

I will make a note and send that to the trust people and get you a proper link. Because that's annoying. And sorry that we have these technical issues this year.

Yeah. New platform. New stuff.

So it happens, but really shouldn't. Thanks for letting us know. So yeah, how to make quick reference. This is actually a pretty neat tool, which I can say because I helped create it when I worked at W3C. So the first thing is you basically have WCAG in there without like the glossary, which is very important, and other stuff.

But it's like trying to simplify finding the appropriate success criteria. And we will see that a little bit during this course. Because when we go through the next couple of weeks, especially if you -- when you have me as your -- as the person who explains your stuff, I will have made these decisions already.

Like which success criteria corresponds to which, like what we do in that week. Like if we have images, what are the related success criteria to images, for example. But this helps you to do that in your basically everyday life.

So you can go to filter. You can say, okay, I want to use version 2.2 because this is what I want to work with. And then you can say in text I want to I'm need to know for visual design.

How do we handle graphical objects? And then it basically hides all the success criteria that are not relevant to your query. And you can see that non-text contrast is the one that is highlighted.

I think it's the only one for this in this case. So you know, oh, this is the one that I should look at. That's actually like a terrible, terrible example.

Because it's only one. Let's say mobile. Like, what do I need if I'm a visual design person?

What do I need to look at for mobile? That I create something that has, you know, orientation, horizontal and vertical. with that.

That it reflows lead to small screens. That the target sizes are big. Which is useful.

And then I see, like, oh, I have two here. And one is a triple A criterion. I don't want triple A criteria in here.

So uncheck this here. And then you only have the double A criterion. And yeah.

And like, okay, these are the only two, three specific things for mobile. Perfect. Or you say, I want to know what's going on with focus.

But I'm also an interaction designer. And then you see that, like, okay, meaningful sequence, use of color, contrast, content on hover and focus, keyboard, no keyboard trap, stuff like that. Character key shortcuts, focus order, focus visible, focus not obscured.

And then error identification stuff. And that's important for focus. And you get all these, like, different slices of what WCAG could be.

And I think that's very useful for, like, just not being super overwhelmed by all the things. Right? And yeah, I think that's very neat.

And yeah, when I worked at W3C, we created this. It could be better as everything, but it's good to have it. Yeah, and then if you show techniques and failures, you can also like show those as well.

So you have like a little bit of a hybrid between like the understanding document and the WCAG success criteria document. All right. I think we should take a break for let's say ten minutes until 2.

Because that's a nice round number. And then I have a couple of articles and things that I want to show. And then we got that.

And all these links will be in the video next to the video when I post it. But yes, here is the link. Okay.

See you at 2. [Break]