Web accessibility - What is it?
Simply put, accessibility means making sure your content is available for all users to access and navigate.
According to statistics published by scope.org 1 in 5 people have a long term illness, impairment or disability. Of course there are many others that will have a temporary disability. Disabilities might include:
- Impaired vision
- Motor difficulties
- Cognitive impairments or learning disabilities
- Deafness or impaired hearing.
Users might need to use screen readers (software that reads aloud content on a page) a special mouse or just keyboard navigation. Web accessibility also benefits a number of other users that don’t have recognised disabilities. For example
- Older users with changing abilities due to age
- Users with ‘situational limitations’ for example bright sunlight or a noisy room
- Users with slow internet or 3G connection
- Users on mobile devices, smartwatches TV screens etc.
- Users with ‘temporary disabilities’ like lost glasses or a broken wrist or recovering from an operation.
The W3C website has published a number of stories of how people with disabilities use the web. This is a really good resource as it helps gives some practical situations especially with disabilities we might not instantly think of such as colour blindness and repetitive strain injury (RSI)
Why is it important?
In some cases, Web Accessibility is required by law. In September 2018 a new law came into effect that requires public sector websites (including central government and local government organisations and some charities) to meet the international WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standard as well as including a valid accessibility statement which will explain how accessible your site is. According to information published on gov.uk
Most public sector websites and apps do not currently meet accessibility requirements. For example, a recent study found that 4 in 10 local council homepages failed basic tests for accessibility.
There are examples where you might be exempt from this legal requirement for example schools or nurseries and some charities (ie not public funded or aimed specifically for users with disabilities). There is also a clause called ‘disproportional burden’ which covers the organisations where ‘ the impact of fully meeting the requirements is too much for an organisation to reasonably cope with’. In such cases an organisation might not need to fully comply with all the requirements. Things like cost impact, resources, and the end benefits for disabled users all need considering but you can’t use reasons like lack of knowledge or other priorities as valid excuses.
According to the gov.uk website
Even if you’re exempt from the 2018 regulations, or judge that meeting them would be a disproportionate burden, under the Equality Act 2010 or the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (in Northern Ireland) you’re still legally required to make reasonable adjustments for people with disabilities when they’re needed - for example, by providing the information they need in another, more accessible format
Their advice also states that:
Most existing websites that were published before 23 September 2018 need to comply with the 2018 regulations by 23 September 2020.
Of course, you should check with your legal advisors if you are unsure or need guidance on this but it is the legal responsibility of the website owners rather than a web designer or developer who helped you build the site.
Aside from legal obligations, there are a number of other benefits that making your website accessible can bring including enhancing your brand and increasing your market reach. Other benefits are:
Makes your website better
Writing clear form validation error messages, or allowing a user to tab through form fields in a logical way are plain and simply just good ways to improve your websites general user experience regardless of disability. Everyone will benefit from good accessibility practices even down to your content writing being clear, easy to read and with sensible sentence length.
Helps with SEO
If you are serious about search and improving your sites’ SEO, accessibility is a no-brainer and actually a lot of crossover between SEO and accessibility exists. For example unique page titles, correct use of heading tags in your HTML markup and descriptive alternative text for images. Device responsive, fast websites are at the top of Googles requirements for good ranking sites - getting these things right will mean better SEO and accessibility - it really is win-win.
Principles for web accessibility
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1) are an internationally recognised set of recommendations for improving web accessibility and are based on 4 design principles
- Perceivable
- Operable
- Understandable
- Robust
Let’s try and unpack some of these principles a little
1) Perceivable
Making sure users can use your service with the senses they have available to them. Examples may include:
- Providing text alternatives to elements such as images
- Providing video transcripts
- Making sure content is accessible and structured so that screen readers can access it
- Use proper HTML markup so that relationships between content types can be recognised properly. ( ie forms, tables and headings)
- Making sure colours (especially used for text) have suitable contrast against backgrounds.
- Ensuring that colour is not solely used to explain or distinguish something.
- Making sure content is accessible with zoomed-in text
- Making sure your site is responsive to the user's device and screen orientation.
2) Operable
Making sure that users can find and use your content regardless of how they choose to access it. Examples may include
- Navigation works for keyboard-only users
- Users can play, pause and stop content
- Allowing users to disable blinking or flashing content
- Make sure users can move through content in a way that makes sense
- Using descriptive links
3) Understandable
Making sure users can understand your content
Examples may include
- Using plain English
- Easy to read content style (ie short sentences)
- Using words and phrases people will recognise and providing explanations where this is not possible.
- Explaining abbreviations and acronyms.
- Making it easy for people to identify and correct errors in form fields.
- Making it clear what language a website is in.
Robust
Making sure your content can be interpreted by a number of user agents.
Examples include
- Using valid HTML
- Making sure your content works with reasonable older browsers
- Making sure that your code allows assistive technologies to be aware of what each component is for.
Testing for accessibility
There are lots of great tools out there that can help you with improving your accessibility on your website. w3.org provides a comprehensive list of over 100 accessibility tools here. Auditing a website will be both a mixture of using tools, scanning your site and manual checks. There are SEO tools like SemRush which can also help pick up accessibility issues like missing alt text and poor page titles and headings. Once you have carried out an audit of your site you will have been able to identify potential issues. Some issues might be easy to fix, while others might take more time and effort but a good place to start would be to target the easy fixes that have the biggest site-wide impact. Once you have completed your audit you will also be able to write an accessibility statement (making sure it is linked on your site - putting it in the footer is a logical place).
Need help? request an audit
If you are feeling a little overwhelmed by all this but think that it is something that you need to address, either contact your web developer who might be able to help you with auditing your current site or alternatively drop us an email and we will be more than happy to provide you with a quote to audit and potentially fix your accessibility issues.
Ultimately the more we are mindful about accessibility and the effect our sites have on all users, the better the web will be. Let's make sure that accessibility remains at the forefront of our websites.
