Making Digital Services Accessible and Inclusive
You’re concerned about digital accessibility, but you’re not sure where to start. You might not even be sure of what exactly digital accessibility is. All you know is that you and your team or organization need to do more.
What is Digital Accessibility?
Accessibility means removing barriers. When digital products are correctly designed, developed, and edited, all users have equal access to information and functionality.
Why Is Accessibility Important?
In the United States, there are over 56 million people with a disability. More than 60% of those people in the US own a computer and 58% own a smartphone.
Approximately 20% of the US population requires some form of assistive technology to browse online content. That could be:
- Screen reading software
- Screen magnifiers
- High contrast views
- Keyboard only navigation
- Voice over on mobile devices
The US Federal Access Board requires the government to comply with Section 508 accessibility guidelines when providing digital services.
Types of Disabilities and User Groups
When creating digital content it’s important to take the following user groups and disabilities into account:
- Vision impaired: Low vision, blindness, color blindness
- Hearing impaired: Hard of hearing, deafness
- Mobility impaired: Physical disabilities
- Cognitive impaired: Reading and learning disorders
- Language barriers: English as a second language
Making Sense of Current Accessibility Guidelines
So what guidelines should you comply with to ensure that your product is fully accessible? There are two different accessibility standards, US and worldwide guidelines. Fortunately, they are now very similar.
1. Section 508 — United States Guidelines
The original Section 508 standards were established back in 2000 by the US Federal Access Board. This was part of the Federal Rehabilitation Act passed by congress. In 2018 these guidelines were revised and more closely mapped to the WCAG, Level A and AA standards.
Section 508 Standards: https://www.section508.gov/
2. WCAG 2.1 — Worldwide Guidelines
WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
The WCAG guidelines are worldwide accessibility guidelines that were established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international community that develops open web standards. The WCAG 2.1 guidelines come in 3 compliance levels, Level A, Level AA and Level AAA.
WCAG 2.1 Guidelines: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/
At San Francisco Digital Services we strive to comply with the WCAG 2.1, Level A and AA guidelines.
Help Your Product Team Understand When and How to Apply the Guidelines
The WCAG 2.1 guidelines are not the easiest to understand if you’re not familiar with accessibility compliance in general.
At San Francisco Digital Services we have created an accessibility checklist and guide that translate those guidelines into actionable items from a designer, developer and content publisher perspective. It’s addressing common accessibility best practices related to color contrast, forms, headings, keyboard accessibility, etc.
Digital Services Accessibility Checklist and Guide https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UCy0UVNmeb_7-LybTbvcp0poVAqU9QbhSKHuDx4GMF0/edit?usp=sharing
Accessibility Testing and Remediation
How do I know if my product is accessible?
The only way to know if your product is accessible is to test it. An accessibility audit is generally performed through a combination of manual and automated accessibility testing.
Manual Testing: An accessibility specialist will try to navigate and interact with your application using different types of assistive technology.
Pros: Thorough; the only way to get a complete picture of a site/application’s accessibility
Cons: Time consuming; requires special expertise
Automated Testing: Software tools that can automatically evaluate your code for accessibility issues as you are building it out.
Pros: Can detect many accessibility issues in seconds; doesn’t require special expertise
Cons: Can’t detect all accessibility issues
Accessibility knowledge takes some time to develop. Most developers, designers and content publishers need a few projects worth of experience before they get the hang of it and understand how to remediate the most common accessibility issues.
Sometimes your product team may not have enough time to remediate all the accessibility issues. If this is the case, work with your accessibility specialist and prioritize the accessibility issues in terms of severity. Then address the most important issues first. You may also find it useful to group the accessibility issues into the following categories 1) content 2) design or 3) markup related.
Upcoming Blog
In my next blog post I will cover the following topic: “Incorporating Accessibility Practices to Your Product Teams”.
