Updated Chinese Accessibility Standard Will Help China Build a Barrier-free Information Environment

[在此查看中文消息] Last August the Chinese Standardization Administration issued a new national standard, GB/T 37668-2019, "Information Technology Requirements and Testing Methods for Accessibility of Web Content". According to the China Disabled Persons' Federation (CDPF) , this standard will be implemented as a recommended standard in March 2020, and will promote technical and policy support for information accessibility development in China.

The standard was jointly developed by a number of organizations, led by CDPF and Zhejiang University. It references the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 and 2.1. W3C congratulates the standard on the closer harmonization with international standards, which we believe can benefit many communities in China.

WCAG, developed by the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), covers a wide range of provisions for making Web content and applications more accessible. Following these guidelines will make content accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity and combinations of these. WCAG has been widely implemented worldwide and adopted as a standard by the United States, the European Union and many other countries and regions. WCAG 2.0 was endorsed as an international ISO/IEC 40500:2012 standard in 2012, and referenced in the European Standard EN 301 549 for web content and mobile applications.

W3C WAI is committed to developing resources to support implementation of Web accessibility standards around the world, and will continue to promote harmonization with international standards for the benefits it brings in authoring tool and evaluation tool support, and sharing of training materials. We encourage businesses and others in China to implement this new national accessibility standard, while also continuing to seek harmonization with international standards, in order to help make the Web accessible for all.