Why did this happen (or rather, didn’t)?
Because like many others, your website isn’t accessible to people who are blind.
Actually, this previous sentence was a bit restrictive, as it mentioned one disability only. Accessibility isn’t just about making the web usable for people who are blind: accessibility is about understanding our users’ diversity and making the web usable by anyone.
Why should you care about making your website accessible?
If you don’t care, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, but aside from the fact you could care for the right reasons (oh, and the law), there’s also a case for accessibility in business and marketing: for every user who can’t access your site, you’re losing an opportunity to acquire a new customer or for advertisers to generate a lead.
“But our target customer isn’t disabled”. Sure!
“most studies find that about one fifth (20%) of the population has some kind of disability” — WebAIM
Although this figure doesn’t mean 20% of the population has trouble browsing the web because of their disabilities, that’s still a lot of lost opportunities.
Still not convinced? Watch a few videos on Apple’s Accessibility page, and you’ll discover how people with disabilities can be empowered by technology in amazing and unexpected ways.
Want to learn how to make your website accessible?
First, let me to be honest with you: starting by reading the WAI-ARIA specification (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) and browsing the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) can discourage you from making anything accessible. The canonical documentation is quite cryptic for beginners and lacks real-world examples that would be useful for developers and designers.
Instead, I’d recommend some other resources especially written by developers for developers. For example, Google just put up an awesome free accessibility course on Udacity, check it out! Alice Boxhall and Rob Dodson also published a text version of part of the content of the course. A massive thanks to both of them!
I’d also like to plug posts from my colleague Jesse Hausler on the Salesforce UX blog: https://medium.com/salesforce-ux/tagged/accessibility. They’re very accessible (see what I did there) to a broad array of audiences.
Finally, when you’re comfortable with a basic level of accessibility concepts, it’s worth considering this resource (especially if you’re building complex sites or apps): WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices 1.1.
Do you know good accessibility learning resources and tools?
Good resources on web accessibility aren’t that easy to come by, so please do share those precious links in the comments!
Thanks to raymonst for inspiring this article.
