What is web accessibility, and why does it matter?
Essentially it's designing and building websites that everyone can use, regardless of disability - be that blind or low vision, deaf or hard of hearing, or motor disabilities.
An accessibile website is one that works with assistive technologies like screen readers, provide captions for audio content, enable logical and easy navigation by keyboard, and so on, to accommodate these extra needs.
Around 15% of the global population has some sort of disability, which means that aside from being a practical, sensible and considerate thing to do, it's also a commercial one. Those people will want your goods and services as much as the next people, so ensuring that they aren't disadvantaged when they visit your site is just good old common sense. In many places, for many business, it's also a legal obligation, of course.
In passing, it's probably worth mentioning that we did a deep dive on this topic back in July last year - have a read once you've finished with this article!
And, incidentally, if you see mention of a11y on LinkedIn and elsewhere, that's an abbreviation - not the most obvious one, granted - for accessibility.
What sort of thing are we talking about?
In essence, web accessibility is making adjustments to the website that don't necessarily make a difference to those using it who do not have extra needs, but make a big difference to those who do.
Screen readers, for example, for blind users, can read out the content of the website - for an image, therefore, adding in an "alt" tag which describes what the image is means that when the screen reader comes to that portion of the site, the user is told what the image represents. If a link is to a specific page, then ensuring that the link text is helpful (a description of where the link goes) rather than just a non-committal "click here" goes a long way.
Whilst many users use a mouse to navigate a website, not all can or do - so ensuring that the site can be navigated logically by a keyboard is essential - out of the box, a website will allow someone to tab through links on a page, but that may be thrown by things like sidebars, pop-out menus, and similar, which would result in the user getting 'lost' whilst trying to get to a particular link.
How do you test for accessibility?
In the very first post in this series we looked at Google's Page Speed Insights - one of the results that it gives you is an accessibilty score. This is a good starting point - it will pick up the obvious things like alt tags for images, colour contrast, text size, and sensible structuring of headings. At the very least you should be aiming for 100 out of 100 on that.
For a more in-depth tool, though, you will want to want to go to the Wave Accessibility Testing Tool - a free online test which goes into much more detail. As well as picking up the things which the Page Speed Insights tool will pick up, it is much more comprehensive. Things like missing form labels, empty links, and other errors (things which must be fixed), as well as alerts on things which should be fixed (where your site skips heading levels, or the alt text provided for an image is either redundant or too long). There are many aspects which would probably never occur to someone who has never had to rely on assistance to browse a site - even seemingly simple things, like justified text, can be problematic for some users. The Wave tool picks them all up.
Some of these things are ones which you may need your developer to help with, but (and particular if your site is built on a specific platform) many should be fixable yourself - alt text, colours and so on.
You're not aiming for perfection, as that's hard to obtain. But it's rare that doing the right thing, and doing the profitable thing, so often align. This is one of those times.
Missed the previous post? Catch up with Day 9: Mobile Optimisation.