Easy summary

Here’s a quick summary of the changes we’ve made to WCAG 1. (If you want to comply with WCAG+Samurai, you have to use the full details in the appropriate sections, not this summary, which is provided here for convenience.)

* Just like in the real world, we assume you’re using HTML and CSS nearly all the time and JavaScript some of the time. We do not assume an unrealized future in which Flash, Silverlight, or other technologies are the main way to deliver Web pages.
* We ban and we require: We don’t mess around with imprecise terms like “avoid” and “until user agents,” whose published definitions are misunderstood or ignored. Instead, you either may or may not apply a guideline. We use terms like “delete,” “ignore,” “not required,” “do not have to use,” and “do not use” on the one hand and “must” on the other.
* No to Priority 3: Not only do you not have to comply with any Priority 3 guidelines, most of which are unworkable, you must not comply with them.
* Yes to Priorities 1 and 2: You must comply with Priority 1 and 2 guidelines, as corrected by the Samurai. Among other things, this means you must have valid code in nearly every case.
* No new guidelines for cognitive disabilities: WCAG 1 and 2 are both inadequate to address the needs of people with cognitive disabilities like dyslexia (though that is only one of many such disabilities, which often have conflicting needs). We couldn’t bring ourselves to delete the only guideline below Priority 3 that attempts to address cognitive disabilities (“Use the clearest and simplest language”), but we also haven’t devised a full suite of new guidelines. Nobody else has, either; it requires considerably more research and, importantly, user testing. Nor do we trust much of what we’ve read from the claimed experts in the field. We are leaving WCAG 1 almost exactly as it is on this subject. Separately, we require that compliance with WCAG+Samurai cannot be a claim of full accessibility to people with cognitive disabilities.
* Tables for layout and frames are banned and all guidelines relating to tables for layout and frames are deleted. You may still use <iframe>.
* Goodbye, <noscript>: Scripts and “applets” (which we would now understand as being Ajax and Flash most of the time) must be directly accessible. Not only may you no longer insert boilerplate content into the <noscript> element, that element must not be used.
* We ban most PDFs: PDFs that should be HTML are banned unless they are accompanied by HTML. All other PDFs have to be tagged.
* Goodbye, 20th-century relics: Instead of worrying about how to make holdovers from the late 20th century accessible, we simply ban unnecessary artifacts like ASCII art.
* We’re more serious about multimedia than anyone else: Nearly all your videos with soundtracks must have captioning, most or all your videos must have audio description (depending on content), you have to transcribe dialogue-heavy podcasts (but not music podcasts), and you can’t use text files or HTML as substitutes for captioning or audio description.