Introduction

This tutorial aims to guide you on ensuring continuous compliance with web accessibility standards in your web development process. Web accessibility ensures that your website's content is accessible to all, including those with disabilities. By the end of this tutorial, you will learn how to:

• Understand web accessibility standards
• Implement these standards in your web development process
• Ensure ongoing compliance with these standards

Prerequisites: Basic understanding of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is necessary.

Step-by-Step Guide

Web accessibility compliance is a continuous process that involves the following steps:

1. Understanding Accessibility Standards: The first step is understanding the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) which provides a wide range of recommendations for making web content more accessible.

2. Audit Your Website: Use automated tools like Lighthouse, Wave, or aXe to audit your website for accessibility issues.

3. Fix Accessibility Issues: Review the results and fix the issues. This might involve modifying your HTML, CSS or JavaScript code.

4. Manual Testing: Automated audits can't catch everything. Need to manually test your site for accessibility.

5. Continuous Monitoring: Regularly audit your website and fix any new issues to ensure continuous compliance.

Code Examples

Example 1: Using semantic HTML

Semantic HTML elements clearly describe their meaning in a human and machine-readable way.

<!-- Use a <nav> element for navigation links -->
<nav>
  <ul>
    <li><a href="#home">Home</a></li>
    <li><a href="#about">About</a></li>
  </ul>
</nav>

<!-- Use a <main> element for the main content of the website -->
<main>
  <h1>Welcome to My Website</h1>
  <p>This is the main content of the website.</p>
</main>

Example 2: Providing text alternatives for non-text content

<!-- Good: Image with alt attribute -->
<img src="dog.jpg" alt="A brown dog playing in a park">

Summary

In this tutorial, you've learnt about web accessibility standards, how to implement these standards in your web development process and ensure ongoing compliance. Next, you can learn more about each WCAG guideline and how to implement them. You can also explore more about automated and manual accessibility testing.

Practice Exercises

1. Exercise 1: Audit your website or a sample website for accessibility issues using an automated tool.
2. Exercise 2: Fix at least one accessibility issue you found during the audit.
3. Exercise 3: Implement accessibility checks in your continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) process.

Solutions: Answers will vary based on the website audited and the specific issues found. You can compare your solutions with best practices as outlined in the WCAG guidelines. Further practice can involve regular auditing and fixing of accessibility issues on different websites.