The POUR principles are a set of guidelines designed to ensure digital content is accessible to everyone, including those with disabilities. The acronym POUR stands for:
- Perceivable: Information and user interface components must be presented in ways that users can perceive. This means providing text alternatives for non-text content, captions for videos, and ensuring content can be presented in different ways (e.g., simpler layout) without losing information.
- Operable: User interface components and navigation must be operable. This includes making all functionality available from a keyboard, giving users enough time to read and use content, and helping users navigate and find content.
- Understandable: Information and the operation of the user interface must be understandable. This involves making text readable and understandable, ensuring web pages appear and operate in predictable ways, and helping users avoid and correct mistakes.
- Robust: Content must be robust enough to be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies. This means using clean, valid code and ensuring compatibility with current and future user tools.
These principles are part of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which provide a comprehensive framework for making web content more accessible. For more information, please view the WCAG 2 Overview | Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) | W3C