It’s not new to anyone that the Web has become an essential aspect of our daily lives, and everyone should have access to this technology. Web Accessibility aims to ensure equivalent access for people regardless of any disabilities.

It is extremely important for organizations and governments worldwide to understand how important web content is and how it can bring numerous benefits for them and for the users trying to access its information. Also, it’s important to say that access to information, including on the Web, is also recognized by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).

Who is impacted?

Web Accessibility addresses all disabilities, including hearing, learning, cognitive, neurological, physical, speech, and visual disabilities. Some examples of Web accessibility features include:

1. Captions on audio and multimedia content for people who are hard of hearing;

A transcription of audio is not only subtitles it’s a word-for-word textual representation of the audio, including descriptions of non-text sounds like “laughter” or “thunder.” Transcripts of audio content are valuable not only for persons with disabilities but in addition they permit searching and indexing of that content, which is not possible with just the audio.

Most of the time, Netflix does a great job with its subtitles function and also includes decent audio transcription.

There is also what we call audio description. It’s meant to provide information on visual content that is considered essential to the comprehension of the program. In these cases, not providing audio description would inhibit blind and visually impaired individuals from gaining a complete understanding of the given program. It can also be found in most new Netflix series.

2. Clear and consistent layout for people with learning and cognitive disabilities;

Couchsurfing is so far a perfect example of accessible design and an easy to read and navigate website. Its design makes it easy for the user to find information without a struggle. Some of the accessible design features are:

• Great heading structure
• Clean and simple interface
• A menu with 9 language options right on top
• Intelligent use of images and colours

Check out this video made by W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) explaining how a user with a disability interact with a poor and inconsistent layout:

3. Keyboard support for people with physical disabilities and who do not use a mouse;

The big difference between the keyboard and the mouse is that when users navigate through the keyboard, the access to the links on the screen are sequential and users must Tab through all the links one by one before reaching one of interest.

This site, the U.S. Government’s official web portal, is fully controllable by keyboard. Users can Tab into it, visibly see which control has focus, and execute that control by pressing enter.

The website also offers a “Skip to main content” link at the top of the page. This link only becomes available when users tab through the page, so it doesn’t disturb the visual design for mouse users.

4. Text alternatives for people with visual disabilities and who are using screen readers;

Adding alternative text for images is the first principle of web accessibility. It is also one of the most difficult to properly implement. The Web is filled with images that have missing, incorrect, or poor alternative text. Like many things in Web Accessibility, determining appropriate, equivalent, alternative text is often a matter of personal interpretation.

If you never had a chance to see how a screen reader works, have a look at the demonstration video below of how JAWS one of the most popular screen readers works.

Web accessibility benefits people with and without disabilities

While accessibility focuses on people with disabilities, it also benefits older users, mobile device users, and other individuals, as well as organizations. Older users with age-related accessibility needs are an increasingly important customer base for most organizations, as the percentage of older users is increasing significantly.

Organizations with accessible websites benefit from search engine optimization (SEO). Just stop and think about the fact that Google’s robot (the one reading and ranking our websites) is blind, so the better your code is done and the more accessible it is, the better your ranking will be. It can also reduce legal risk, increase the demonstration of corporate social responsibility (CSR), and customer loyalty.

Another important consideration for organizations is that Web Accessibility is required by laws and policies in some cases. WAI “Web Accessibility Policy Resources” links to resources for addressing legal and policy factors within organizations, including a list of relevant laws and policies around the world.

In my future posts, I will talk more technically about how to improve accessibility on your website, showing examples of how people with different disabilities interact with it.

Thanks for reading!