TL. DR.
What are Levels A, AA and AAA? What types of disabilities do
part of each group? What are the criteria for each of these levels?
What my site needs to meet to be at least a Level A of
accessibility?
There is a ranking of the websites provided by W3(WCAG) based on how much your website serves, or may serve, the public, in which A,AA and AAA are the levels ,the first being the minus the forward, and the last the most.
To understand how it works it is necessary to understand that it is divided into 4 principles for the development of a website:
perceptible, operable, comprehensible and robust.
Perception
- The information components and user interface should be presentable to users in ways they can perceive.
Nielsen’s heuristics deal with several points of perception, how easy it is to realize what each component/ of your site.
Operable
- User interface and navigation components shall be operable (operational).
Understandable
- operation and information shall be comprehensible.
Robust
- It should be robust enough information for a large majority of people (users) to interpret correctly, including assistive technologies.
Excerpt translated and adapted from WCAG website.
Among every great principle is a series of evaluations , that at the end will generate a note and tell whether or not it will be a ranked site.
Each Evaluation is detailed by the site (in English), it would be huge to put only one of them, therefore I will not explain each 1.
For an A there is a minimum of requirements to be met. They can be found here.
Are there any audit tools, or an Extension or
Browser Devtools I can use to evaluate the current level
accessibility on my website?
W3 Provides a list of tools all that I have used are free of charge, or a quantity of use is.
This example was taken from a check made in this website(is listed in the WCAG list). It displays a list detailing what can be improved and can be found in the list.
The accessibility and grade of this Level can be used by Google as
ranking criteria of the website? Can I be punished for having a website
inaccessible?
First we need to understand the google algorithm and its research. Both links are in Portuguese, including the research includes an explanatory video( and very well explained) of the subject.
The main punishment of a website without usability is only its "forgetfulness", that is, if it does not break any law or cause any misunderstanding that may harm its user. Sites with more advertisements (on other sites) tend to have more Dexes, consequently tend to stay ahead of others.
Note: All Improvement Lists, information/technical instructions are available on the WCAG website.
Historically speaking this type of ranking (by letters, A,AA.... ) began with financial credit risk( default), just before the crisis of 1873, with the creation of the first risk agencies. It’s a similar review , however, instead of checking if your site is good, check whether or not you can afford it.
Hugo, includes one more question, which groups of need meets each
Level. Because in a survey with we can identify if our personas will be met with thelevelTo or it would have to be AAA. Congratulations on the question!– David
@Thank you young David! Include in my question the groups and types of disability. The persona part I think would get a little bit out of the scope of the question, because these are particular cases of each project, profiling persona I think would involve too much of a question just rss
– hugocsl
Good afternoon Hugo! The website https://www.tawdis.net/? lang=pt# allows assessing the level of accessibility and highlights the points that attributed the classification achieved. These points can guide the fulfillment of the premises of increased accessibility and consequently, classification. I hope it will be useful :)
– Fábio Vieira