Accessibility Guidelines and Regulations
When you review available accessibility guidelines/regulations, you will encounter numerous acronyms and standards including WAI, WCAG, ARIA and Section 508. Let's take a quick look at the relationships between accessibility-related guidelines/regulations.
Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), a part of The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), publishes Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) which include guidelines for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA). All these guidelines have a lot in common with the regulations imposed on software by national governments. In United States, the goverment-imposed standard is most commonly referred to as Section 508. The full name is "Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as amended in 1998 (29 U.S.C. § 794 (d))". This set of regulations is a must-follow for all software companies that develop software to be used by government agencies.
If accessibility compliance is important to your organization, please refer to the following resources for additional information/guidance: