How to Develop an Accessible Website
Our Website Services team often gets questions like, “Is my website accessible?” and “Is my website ADA compliant?”
Both are well-informed questions to ask but difficult to answer. Usually, these questions are reactionary—for example, someone noticed a similar company getting sued for having an inaccessible website and wanted to make sure their website was compliant.
When it comes to measuring website accessibility, compliance isn’t a cut-and-dry measurable standard. According to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is the organization that determines website accessibility compliance guidelines, “Even content that conforms at the highest level (AAA) will not be accessible to all individuals with all types, degrees, or combinations of disability, particularly in the cognitive language and learning areas.”
The most critical, measurable statistic with website accessibility is making sure your website is easy for customers in your industry to use. For example, if you’re an optometrist, you should have more extensive text options available for reading. Similarly, a hearing aid manufacturer would be recommended to include closed captions on all their videos.
In this guide, we’ll:
Who Determines Website Accessibility Standards?
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 are managed by W3C, “an international community that develops open standards to ensure the long-term growth of the web.” W3C last updated the WCAGs on December 11, 2018.
According to W3C, “Following these guidelines will make content accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity and combinations of these. Following these guidelines will also often make your web content more usable to users in general.”
The WCAGs scores website accessibility according to the following scale: A (Accessible), AA (More Accessible), and AAA (Most Accessible).
What Are the Four Principles of Website Accessibility?
To be considered accessible, websites must be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. Here’s what each of those characteristics means for your website:
Perceivable
Your website presents content in a way that anyone can understand. For example, visual and audio content should be accessible to everyone, regardless of visual or auditory impairments.
Operable
Your website provides a user-friendly experience that’s familiar and functional for everyone. For example, people with motor difficulties that cannot use a mouse should be able to fully navigate your website using a keyboard.
Understandable
Your website’s structure is familiar to most people. Content should be programmatically determined, which means “content is delivered in such a way that user agents, including assistive technologies, can extract and present this information to users in different modalities.”
Robust
Your website is technically adequate and can easily be parsed. According to W3C, “In content implemented using markup languages, elements have complete start and end tags, elements are nested according to their specifications, elements do not contain duplicate attributes, and any IDs are unique, except where the specifications allow these features.”
How to Make Your Website More Accessible
Accessibility testers can be run online to give a vague idea of how accessible a website is. According to Lindsay Boxberger, Digital Marketing and Website Services Manager at High Touch, “There isn’t an exact answer to ‘Is my website ADA compliant?’ Instead of attempting a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to that question, it may be better to take a step back and consider things you can do to make your website more compliant. For example, accessibility doesn’t solely depend on whether a text-to-audio device or screen reader works flawlessly on every page. There are additional accessibility standards like the contrast of colors used throughout a website for color blindness or using a keyboard to navigate a website instead of a mouse for motor disabilities.”
Here are ten things you can do to help make your website more accessible:
- Use Contrasting Colors. According to WebAIM, WCAG 2.0 level AA requires a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1. Your website elements should be easy to see, and text should be easy to read by people who are blind and/or visually impaired, including people who are colorblind.
- Give Your Images Alternative Text (Alt Text). Add alternative text for images and other non-text components. Alt text allows devices like screen readers to relay a description of the image to people who are blind and/or visually impaired.
- Write Captions and Alternative Scripts. Videos on your website should include closed captions or an alternative way for people with hearing sensitivities to experience audio content.
- Record Sign Language Videos. Depending on your content and audience, your website may benefit from including sign language translations.
- Choose an Easy-to-Read Font. Use a font that uses simple characters with ample spacing. Avoid small and complicated, script-like fonts.
- Test Your Website Without a Mouse. People with motor disabilities should be able to use your website and access different web pages and features without using a mouse.
- Pause and Hide Disruptive Features. Users should easily be able to pause and dismiss elements like pop-up videos or product offers that disrupt the traditional website experience.
- Avoid Flashing Items. Don’t use any graphics, animations, or videos with strobing or flickering effects that may be harmful to people with seizure and vestibular disorders.
- Write Descriptive Headings. Your headings should make it easy for people using screen readers to navigate through the content without getting lost.
- Test With a Screen Reader. To fully experience your website’s accessibility, use a screen reader to see if your website is accessible and where you can make improvements to the user experience.
What Tools Can Help Measure Your Website’s Accessibility?
Webaccessibility.com
This free tool allows you to enter a webpage URL and see your website’s accessibility score. Once you register, you can download a list of “violations” to fix and make your website more accessible. Check your score.
WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool
“WAVE is a suite of evaluation tools that helps authors make their web content more accessible to individuals with disabilities.” Upon entering your webpage address, the WAVE tool displays general errors, contrast errors, and other alerts alongside your actual webpage, so you can see where you need to make improvements. Test your site.
Keep in mind, these tools rely on basic algorithms—your actual website accessibility will depend on your industry’s accessibility needs. A deeper dive and assessment from a website development professional can help you understand how to interpret compliance scores and where you can improve.
We Help Make Things Easier.
Do you have questions about website accessibility? We can help. Click here to send your questions to our Website Development team or learn more about building an accessible website for your company.
Disclaimer. The information contained in this site is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice.