Accessibility
Despite there being a growing awareness around the topic, digital accessibility is still one of the most overlooked aspects of the internet, and for many business’s websites.
Commonly misunderstood and dismissed as a niche concern, the implications of ignoring digital accessibility can be far-reaching and significant. Accessibility affects far more of your customers than you have likely imagined, and ignoring it carries both legal and business risk.
What is web accessibility?
Web, or digital accessibility is the process of designing and building a website that can be used by people with a wide range of abilities. Included in this, but not limited to, is ensuring support for visual impairments, hearing loss, motor limitations, and cognitive differences.
We often hear people expressing concern that having an accessible website means it will be boring, or lack brand personality—but that is not the case. Accessible design doesn’t mean having a separate or “flavorless” version of your website, it just means making sure that website works for everyone.
Who does web accessibility affect?
Like we mentioned above, web accessibility is not a niche issue. In fact, 1 in 4 United States adults live with some form of disability. Not to mention, accessibility improvements can also aid users dealing with situational limitations such as bright sunlight, a broken hand, older devices, or even slow connections. Older poplulations, and individuals dealing with common conditions like color-blindness or poor eysight will also benefit significantly from accessibility-minded design.
At the end of the day, ensuring you have an accessible website is one of the best things you can do for all of your users and their overall experience—regardless of their disabilities or lack there of.
The legal and business risk
The ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) stipulates web accessibility as a requirement for businesses and has been applied to an increasing number of lawsuits in recent years.
With web accessibility lawsuits increasing significantly in the past decade there is growing attention and awareness on sites that are inaccessible. It’s increasingly important to begin focusing effort on improving your website’s accessibility before it becomes a problem.
How accessibility and SEO overlap
In addition to the legal requirements and overall experience improvements gained through accessible design, many web accessibility best practices have a direct impact on a website’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization) rankings. These impacts can include the following:
1. Alt text on images:
Alt text allows screen readers to describe images to visually impaired users and helps search engines better index your website content.
2. Clear heading structure:
Ensuring your content follows appropriate heading structures helps users who rely on assistive technology to both navigate and to understand the hierarchal importance of information they consume. It is also critical for search engines to understand and properly index page content.
3. Descriptive link text:
Descriptive link text improves navigation with screen readers and provides valuable context to search engines.
Common mistakes
The following issues are some of the most frequently overlooked aspects of a website, and some of the easiest accessibility issues to improve on:
- Missing alt-text on images
- Low contrast text colors that re difficult to read
- Hiding form labels—or removing them when the user enters a value
- Missing captions on videos
- Blocking or limiting the ability to navigate a website via the keyboard (using tab and enter keys)
- PDFs that are not configured to support screen readers
Where to start
1. Run an automated audit:
Use a free tool like Google Lighthouse or WAVE to generate a list of accessibility issues on your website. While these tools cannot identify every accessibility issue they will help to spot and sometimes fix major issues, making them a good starting point for improvements.
2. Focus on the easiest fixes first:
Issues like color contrast, alt-text, and form-labels are common problems that are typically easy-to-identify and easy-to-resolve yourself. Start by fixing these issues as you work to identify and rectify additional accessibility issues.
3. Make new content accessible from the start:
Whenever you create or add new content to your website—such as images, videos, and PDFs—make sure your adhering to accessibility best practices in their creation and development.
It’s much easier to add alt-text to new images as they are individually added to a website that it is to have to go back and add it to every image on the site down the road.
4. Budget for additional support
The best way to ensure you’re meeting legal compliance is to hire an expert to help you identify and correct outstanding issues. While you can absolutely make some major improvements on your own, you should consider budgeting for a professional accessibility audit to reveal additional issues and double check your improvements were made correctly.
Depending on the frequency with which you update your website you may consider hiring ongoing support, or conducting accessibility audits on a routine cadence. Don’t be afraid—while the initial effort may seem like a lot of work, implementing accessibility best practices for new content and conducting ongoing accessibility checkups will make maintaining your website’s accessibility significantly easier.