A rising tide lifts all boats

I often see people relating web accessibility, #a11y, on the web directly to the requirements of people who use screen readers or other assistive technologies, or for the more narrow-minded; blind people. Though this appears to be a common belief these people are just a tiny subset of those with web accessibility needs. Web accessibility is, in my opinion, largely misunderstood.

We all need accessible websites 🔗

We all need websites to be accessible because we will all, at some point in our lives, have a varying level of (dis)ability. This reduced ability may be permanent, temporary or transient and the degree to which it affects us will vary. Ultimately, all website users have web accessibility requirements.

As a spectacle wearer my eyes were never perfect to begin with and as an old man I’ve now realised that, as we all discover in due time, old eyes don’t work as well as young eyes. I don’t have any figures, but a quick glance around tells me that a hefty percentage of people also have visual impairment of some kind. Glasses are pretty popular right? They become more popular with age!

In addition I also have duetoranopia, a visual disability that affects an eround 1% of the male population. 8% of human males and 0.6% of females of Northern European ancestry ¹ have some form of colour deficiency. Add that to the number of people that wear glasses to correct their vision and that’s a lot of people with a visual impairment. All these people benefit from an accessible web, we all do.

Web accessibility and you 🔗

You don’t wear glasses, you’re eyes are perfect, so you’re thinking web accessibility does not concern you? Consider these scenarios;

• It’s winter, so you’re wearing gloves, or you’re not so you’ve got cold hands. Either way you have a (transient) limited ability to click small buttons or links, you need adaquately-sized tap targets. As luck would have it that is an accessibility requirement(*).
• You broke your arm, so you have a (temporary) disability that makes it harder to use a mouse / trackpad. You could use a keyboard to navigate between fields on a form, if it meets accessibility requirements.
• You’re outside, the sun is shining, you need sufficient contrast between text and background, you need links to look like links. You guessed it, these are web accessibility requirements.

Popular misconceptions 🔗

There’s so many it’s hard to list them all, but no doubt you all have heard (or believe) some of these:

• Accessible websites are for blind people.
• Accessible websites look awful.
• I’m don’t need to make my site accessible.
• Making my site accessible wont benefit my business.

Common excuses 🔗

• Blind people don’t need to access my site/service, they’re not our target audience.
• Making my site accessible would be prohibitively expensive.
• It’s pretty much impossible to achieve an accessible website.

We all use assistive technologies 🔗

It’s likely that we all use an ‘assistive technology’ at some point. As an iPhone user I know that my device does a lot of work to make my experience of the web more accessible. Take a browsers reader view for example; this (assistive) technology can take a well-formed web page and give me a easy-to-read, distraction-free, more accessible version of the content.

How does reader view work? Why does it sometimes not? 🔗

Browsers can interpret various html elements and the document structure to provide these alternate methods to access the content, in exactly the same way a screen reader would. If a web page uses the correct header tags then these can be identified as headers, and displayed as such. A cornerstone of web accessibility is using the right tool for the job.

Use something that is visually identical, but without the correct markup? It looks the same, right? Unfortunately, your browser wont have a clue, neither will Google’s indexing robots, neither will a screen-reader. Bad code, bad results all round.

Web accessibility is a requirement 🔗

In many places the law requires it. Depending on where you live your business may be legally required to ensure to provide an accessible website. In the US it is the Americans with Disabilities Act 🔗 , in the EU it is the ****, both require accessibility as a fundamental human right.

There are consequences to ignoring these requirements, just ask Dominos pizza².

Accessibility benefits everybody 🔗

There are no downsides. Making your site accessible is good for all users of your site, without exception. And, as numerous studies have shown(*) websites that better serve their users sell more things, whether that’s books, beer or religion; the more people it works for, the better it is for your megacorp / startup / church.

People prefer websites that work for them, it’s obvious. Nail web accessibilty and your website will work for as many people (and robots) as possible, which is good for you and good for your visitors.

How do I get started? 🔗

I’m glad you asked!

At Kind 🔗 we are committed to doing good, being kind is what we do best and we have a lot of experience in the field of web accessibility. Whilst there are no turnkey options to implementing and accessible website the best place to start is by implementing the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 🔗 .

WCAG is designed explicitly for the web and is seen as the gold standard, often being referred to directly in legislation as a minimum requirement.

We can help you:

• Audit your website
• Identify accessibility issues
• Identify accessibility requirements for your business
• Detail the impacts of the issues
• Propose fixes to impacts
• Design accessible versions of failing parts
• Highlight areas for improvement
• Integrate web accessibilty into your workflow
• Regularly maintain standards
• Keep you up to date with legal requirements

Good developers, responsible developers, experienced developers ensure that web accessibility is baked into everything they do because that’s good practice, it’s doing things right. The web is accessible to start with, we need to ensure we don’t break things.