Guide to Improved Website Accessibility

When building a website, it is important to keep in mind that not everyone in your audience may have the same abilities you do. This is why designing with accessibility in mind is so important; essentially, it means ensuring your website can be successfully navigated even by people with disabilities. If you own a business, you should be particularly mindful of people with disabilities as they represent a fairly large portion of the population.

The World Bank Group estimates that about one billion people, or 15% of the entire world’s population, have some sort of disability. As far as the U.S. is concerned, 2012 figures from the Census Bureau showed that 56.7 million Americans, or 18.7% of the U.S. population, have a disability. Out of those, about 38.3 million or 12.6% have a severe disability.

It is important to know these numbers because a good part of your audience may also have disabilities which may impact their ability to use technology. Here are some figures to showcase how people may find it difficult to browse websites:

· 19.9 million people (8.2%) in the U.S. have difficulty liftin objects or grasping them, which may make using a mouse and keyboard difficult

· 8.1 million people (3.3%) in the U.S. have impaired vision, meaning they might rely on screen readers or magnifiers, or they may have some form of color blindness

· 7.6 million people (3.1%) in the U.S. have impaired hearing, which means they might rely on transcripts or captions for audio or video content

As you can no doubt tell, accessibility is important and designing with it in mind is crucial to ensuring everyone can successfully navigate your website and ultimately convert. Accessibility is important because:

· as a business, you are legally obligated to implement certain accessibility features on your website

· you want to expand your audience as much as possible

· it improves usability for all your users, not just those with disabilities

· it creates an equal opportunity for all your users to access the same information

The benefits of designing with accessibility in mind

In a nutshell, accessibility matters because everyone should be able to access the information on your website. Accessibility guidelines conform to a good user experience and a good UX means that your users are happy.

The main benefits of an accessible website include an expanded audience, better usability, legal compliance, and equal opportunities for all your users. Additionally, your SEO efforts will also benefit as a result of improved accessibility as search engines rank accessible websites higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Here are six reasons for why your business should care about accessibility:

1. it can increase your audience

2. it increases your website’s usability

3. it has SEO benefits as your website becomes more machine readable

4. it offers a humanitarian benefit as it allows everyone to access the same information

5. it ensures you meet certain legal requirements

6. it helps you provide all your users with equal access and equal opportunities

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are guidelines published by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is the primary international standards organization for the internet.

The WCAG checklist is a list of techniques meant to help designers and developers meet accessibility guidelines and success criteria. While the techniques are periodically updated, the principles, guidelines, and success criteria remain the same.

It is recommended to follow those guidelines to show good faith and that your company is concerned with accessibility and having a website which anyone can use regardless of their needs and difficulties.

The guidelines fall under four accessibility principles:

1. perceivable — information and UI component need to be presented to users in a way they can easily perceive

2. operable — UI components and navigation need to be operable

3. understandable — information and the UI need to be easily understandable

4. robust — content needs to be sufficiently robust to be reliably interpreted by all manner of user agents, including assistive technologies

Coding best practices for accessibility

Even if you are not necessarily considering accessibility, you should still be following certain guidelines to ensure your code is sound. If not, even basic accessibility work will be difficult.

Here are a few “must-haves” to ensure that your code is in good shape:

1. parsing — bad HTML can throw off screen readers, which means you need to ensure your website does not have any major code errors.

2. language of page — ensure that your page presents text and other types of content in a language that screen readers can understand. For example, assistive technologies will load correct pronunciation rules if your website has an assigned language, visual browsers correctly display characters and scripts, and media players can correctly display captions.

3. link purpose (in context) — ensure that your hyperlinks are clear and easy to understand, and that similar links have consistent descriptions. This helps users decide whether a link is of interest to them by ensure the link destination is clear to them. This allows for easy navigation for every user.

4. focus order — ensure that your users can navigate through your content sequentially and encounter information in order. This affects keyboard accessibility. For example, when someone presses “tab” through navigate through a page, the order in which they encounter elements on your page must make sense. Jumping from the navigation bar to the sidebar and back for no discernable reason is not a good user experience.

5. meaningful sequence — this means that content is ordered in a logical manner. Meaningful sequences ensure that users with assistive technologies encounter content within a system in the intended order.

Accessibility and the law

The Americans with Disabilities Act is the U.S. law which primarily governs accessibility. Basically, if you do not make things accessible, you are discriminating against people with disabilities, which is punishable by law.

While the ADA does not specifically mention websites, Title III has typically been interpreted by both the Department of Justice (DOJ) and U.S. courts to apply to websites as well. Both websites and mobile applications are now considered “places of public accommodation.”

What this means is that if there is anything commercial about your website, then you need to pay attention to accessibility unless you want to risk legal issues. While there is no formal legal prescription for web accessibility for private entities in the U.S., that does not mean you are free to do whatever you want.

The closest guidance available comes from the ADA itself: ADA Best Practices Tool Kit for State and Local Governments. While the documentation is over 13 years old and is only reserved to Tittle II, this is the best we have.

If we examine Title III of the ADA, however, while it does not specifically refer to websites or mobile apps, we have to go by the statute’s broad language, which requires “the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations of any place of public accommodation.”

What this means is that you have to design your website in such a way that everyone, including those with disabilities, can enjoy the “full and equal” use of your website and is able to access the content on it, navigate it, and overall interact with it to the same degree of success as anyone else.

Accessibility audits

Audits are formal evaluations which are performed by experts who manually evaluate websites and test them against WCAG requirements. After such an expert has completed their audit, they deliver a report which details any accessibility issues found.

It is important to remember that these audits are conducted manually. Many digital marketing agencies and even some accessibility agencies will try to pass of an automated scan as an audit, but automated scans are nowhere near as accurate as identifying potential accessibility issues.

Good accessibility audits from reputable providers are normally in the 4-figure range for most websites.

Accessible design principles

Before we finish, let’s go ahead and take a quick look at some common accessible design principles. Most of these can be implemented without compromising your website’s overall look and feel.

· Use alternative text — alternative text ensures a textual alternative to non-text content within a web page. It is particularly useful for blind people who rely on screen readers to navigate web pages.

· Create logical document structures — structural elements such as headings and list provide web pages with meaning and structure. At the same time, they can also improve keyboard navigation.

· Use headers for data tables — data tables require row and column header cells to associate them with their corresponding data cells. This makes it easier for people who use screen readers to navigate and understand a table.

· Ensure your users can complete and submit every form — every form element such as text fields, dropdowns, checkboxes, and so on, need to have programmatically associated labels. Every user must be able to submit a form and recover from any potential errors.

· Write links which make sense out of context — every link that users read should make sense by itself. Users with screen readers may choose to only read the links on a page, and things like “click here” or “read more” will not be of much use to them.

· Caption or provide transcripts for media content — any audio or video content on your website should have captions and perhaps even transcripts available.

· Ensure the accessibility of documents, presentation files, or any other non-HTML content — any documents of other non-HTML content should be as accessible as possible. If that is something you cannot do, consider using HTML instead of at least providing an accessible alternative. When using PDF documents, ensure you are used tags to make them more accessible. Tags in PDF files allow easier navigation across the document for those using screen readers.

· Allow skipping of repetitive elements on pages — every page on your website should provide users ways of skipping navigation or other elements which are repeated on every page. Most websites usually do this by including a “skip to main content” link at the top of each page.

· Do not rely solely on color for meaning — while color may enhance comprehension, on its own it cannot always convey meaning. Some users with a form of color blindness may not accurately identify your colors and they will be completely unavailable to screen readers.

· Ensure your content is clear, concise, and easily readable — remember to write clearly, use clear and easy to read fonts, and use headings and lists in a logical manner.

· Make your JavaScript accessible — ensure that your JavaScript event handlers are device independent, such as not requiring users to use a mouse.

· Design to standards — ensuring that the HTML and CSS on your page is valid will enhance accessibility by making your code more flexible and robust.

Final thoughts

The internet offers us a level of freedom and independence that is unavailable through other mediums and when you do not pay attention to accessibility, you exclude segments of the population which may stand to gain the most out of using the internet. As you become more aware of accessibility and begin to implement it on your website, you are doing your part to ensure that the web is open and accessible by a larger part of the population.

Keep in mind that making your website accessible and more usable for people with disabilities will also improve the experience of everyone else who visits it, whether they suffer from a disability or not. It stands to reason that the easier a website is to use for those who have certain limitations, the easier it also is to use for everyone else.

While the most basic measures of making a website more accessible are not that difficult to implement, there’s still some know-how required to successfully do it and also to go a few steps further to ensure the absolute best experience for all your website visitors.