How SimplePart Improves Your Site’s Accessibility (and why it matters!)
Find out how we make your site accessible to everyone
One aspect of the SimplePart’s sites that sets us apart and furthers our role as an industry leader is our compliance with WCAG — Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
These are guidelines published by the Web Accessibility Initiative as a set of recommendations to make the Internet more accessible for people with disabilities. The goal is to make sure a website is Perceivable, Operable, Understandable and Robust.
Four Steps to WCAG Compliance
The first step — making a website Perceivable — means the information on the website must be presented in a way users can easily comprehend. One thing SimplePart does to meet this criteria is coding alt-text into our websites so users with screen readers don’t miss out on any images, audio or videos on a website.
Next, a website must be Operable, meaning there must be multiple ways to operate the components and navigation of the website, and all functionality needs to be available from a keyboard. On the sites SimplePart creates, users can tab through the different areas of the site, making it possible for customers who can’t use a mouse to still use our sites.
The operation of a website must be Understandable by everyone who visits it. To meet this guideline, we ensure all text on websites appears at a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 so it’s easy-to-read for all our users. Additionally, our sites include shortcuts to close notifications, access the cart and more in order to make the web pages operate predictably and consistently for everyone.
Finally, to be considered WCAG-compliant, a website must be Robust, meaning the content needs to be reliably interpreted by both a wide variety of users and assistive technology. For this, we make sure the coding on every one of our websites is tagged appropriately and structured properly to make it easy for assistive technologies to navigate them.
Levels of Compliance
The Initiative grades compliance on three levels: A, AA, and AAA. SimplePart’s websites are designed to meet AA compliance, which means we’ve gone beyond the industry standard in making sure our websites are accessible to as many people as possible.
As part of our continued effort for accessibility, we’re constantly working with the Web Accessibility Initiative to fine-tune our websites as techniques and guidelines change.
