Website Accessibility: What It Is and How to Address It

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. You may know that this law brought about many, now ubiquitous, images in our daily lives such as sidewalk curb ramps, wheelchair accessible bathrooms in public buildings, push button door openers, and more. According to a US Census Bureau brief, nearly 1 in 5 Americans has a disability of some kind, representing 20% of your prospective customers. If your clientele is international, the total number of customers is even greater.

Being accessible allows a greater number of clients to come through your doors, whether physically of virtually via your website. Taking steps to ensure website accessibility will not only make you more inviting to a target population, but many of these approaches will also improve your search results and create a better experience for all your customers.

What Is an Accessible Website?

But what does it mean to have an accessible website? You may be asking "Is it costly? Will I still get to pick my own designs? What can I do on my own to help?"

Fear not. There are many simple, no-cost things you can control in your website depending on your website management tool. Other things you may need to discuss with your website development team.

First, let's look at the four basic principles of Web content accessibility as defined in the guidelines authored by the World Wide Web Consortium, a web standards body. These principles are perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.

Perceivable means that the website should offer multiple means of getting the information from the website, including visual, aural, and textual. For example visual images should have text alternates and videos and sound clips should have captioning options.

Operable means that someone can navigate the website with other than just a mouse, specifically a keyboard. For example, a user can tab through the various controls and links, and the website may also offer specific keyboard controls to execute certain functions.

Understandable means that an average person can understand everything you are trying to say with your website, even if it is of a technical nature.

Robust means that the content can be interpreted by multiple technologies. Usually this means multiple browsers and assistive technologies such as readers and interpreters. Writing using standard HTML will typically satisfy this requirement.

"What Can I Do?"

There are a number of things you can do to address these priciples, as well as some web tools that can help a little. One warning on web tools, however. They can only do some amount of checking. Most tools also require additional evaluation of the results. So passing the tool's "test" does not mean the website if fully compliant. The W3 Consortium provides an entire section devoted to evaluation tools you can investigate. We'll mention a few below.

1. Start during the design phase. The best time to look at accessibility is during the design phase. Using standard HTML is an important first step. Most of the popular content management systems (for example, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla) provide standard modules to help with many of these issues.
2. Check your website palette for good color contrast.A simple way to check your website colors is to look at them in black and white. So printing out or even previewing your webpage in black and white can identify many problems early in the design process. Another nice online tool is Contrast-A. This tool does the calculations to determine whether color blind individuals will be able to read your text against your background color. Look for an "X" in the level threshold section for colors that will not work well together.
3. Evaluate your website. As we mentioned, there are many tools available, each focused on different aspects. Here are two you can use to start: Wave by WebAIM and Hera by Sidar. Both of these tools allow you to type in the web pages online and provide an immediate result. Another useful tool is Website Grader by HubSpot. In addition to checking for Alt attributes and grading the reading level of your website, it also provides information that can help improve your search results.
4. Use the "Alt" attribute in images.Whenever you add an image to a blog entry or a page, be sure to take advantage of the image load feature that lets you include an Alt image attribute as well as a Title. The Alt attribute is used by the browser if images are turned off. The Title attribute is used as a "tool tip" that shows up when you hover over an image.
5. Work with your development team.Make sure your development team understands your website accessibility requirements. Some standards they should use include: consistent use of web conventions, use of acronym tags, helpful page titles, unique link texts per page, labels on form elements, and testing the page with Java script disabled. If they give you access to some of these values via a content management tool, make sure you are using them fully and correctly.

Making your website accessible doesn't have to cost a lot, but it does require some discipline on your part. Make sure you are actively and correctly using the tools available to you via your website content management software or your partnership with your web development team.