What is Web Accessibility?
Web accessibility is about websites that have been designed to be inclusive of all people, including people with disabilities, to ensure that all users have a good user experience and have equal access to a website's content and functionality. By correctly applying accessibility standards to a website you are improving its usability for all users.
Some facts about disabilities in Australia:
- Over 4.4 million people in Australia have some form of disability. That’s 1 in 5 people.
- 17.8% of females and 17.6% of males in Australia have a disability.
- Over 13 million Australians (55% of the total population) have one or more long-term eye conditions, based on self-reported data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) 2017–18 National Health Survey (NHS).
Source [Australian Network on Disability]
“The power of the Web is in its universality.
Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.”Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web
Reasons for accessibility
The World Wide Web has been designed to work for all of its users, whatever their language, software, hardware, location, or ability. When the web meets this goal, it becomes accessible to people of a diverse range of sight, hearing, movement, and cognitive abilities.
Reason #1
It's the right thing to do morally
Designing your website should be about providing the best user experience that you can for all of your website's users, inclusive of people with disabilities, given the statistics mentioned above, people with disabilities are not a silent minority, they are a large proportion of our society and should be catered for accordingly, this way nobody gets left out.
Reason #2
Web Accessibility increases your customer base
Designing a site that is accessible for all users greatly increases the number of people that can readily access the information on your website. If more people can access the content on your site then it will have a greater opportunity for growth and success.
Having an accessible site is not only about making it accessible to users with physical disabilities either, it also caters for:
- people living remotely that have a slow Internet connection, or that have very limited or expensive bandwidth.
- people using mobile devices, smartwatches, smart TVs, console browsers, and other devices with limited screen sizes.
- elderly users with changing abilities due to ageing.
Reason #3
Increase your Search Engine Results Page rankings
Website accessibility affects a website’s visibility on search engine results pages (SERP). When you consider that the user experience (UX) of a website affects the amount of time that a person spends on your website interacting with your content, a poorly designed site that is not accessible will greatly devalue a good user experience and increase the bounce rate of its visitors, this, in turn, lowers a websites search engine results page ranking as a higher bounce rate suggests that the search term that brought a user to the site in the first place is not relevant to what they are looking for.
Designing a site that is easier to navigate for all users regardless of disabilities enhances the user experience and sites usability, this keeps bounce rates lower and a site's rankings higher. Moreover, accessibility standards are also part of SEO best practices, such as the use of descriptive alternative text in the imagery of a site, properly structured pages and title tags, all of these make a site more accessible to different types of navigation such as screen readers and keyboard navigation.
Reason #4
It is not a very difficult task to include accessibility features
One of many and varying reasons why designers and developers choose not to include accessibility in their web design is because they believe that it will be too difficult and time-consuming a task to introduce web accessibility standards. In fact, with a small amount of planning, and consideration it is not a particularly difficult task to make a website more accessible. All it really takes is an awareness of accessibility from a design standpoint. In a lot of cases, it can be harder to make a site that isn’t accessible.
To get started with designing for web accessibility W3 have created a helpful guide to assist with designing and meeting the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) requirements.
Reason #5
In many countries, it’s the law to create websites that are accessible
This by no means should be a driving force to create sites that are accessible for all of the webs users but, it does build encouragement to do so. In the USA, for example, George H. W. Bush in 1990 signed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA. The act states that people with disabilities should get access to public accommodation and public services.
Which means that any business that is serving the public will also need to provide access to people with disabilities. While not explicitly covering websites at that period of time, this act in 2018 alone led to over 2285 website accessibility lawsuits and this number is only increasing as the years go by.
At ICEMEDIA, we have been creating websites, intranets, extranets, mobile solutions and software applications to meet WCAG 2.1 level accessibility conformance for many years. All members of our design and development team have been trained to understand what’s required to meet accessibility conformance. Contact us and let’s work together to make your website accessible to the masses.
Here are 3 quick ways that you can get started by introducing web accessibility standards to your site..
ALT-TAGS
alt tags are used on websites imagery to enable a description of the given image to be output if the image cannot be seen or displayed. To maximise the accessibility of the alt tag you need to make sure that is as descriptive as it can be, this helps screen readers to relay the information you are trying to portray to them.[What are alt tags?]
KEYBOARD NAVIGATION
Some of the users of the web are unable to use or don’t have access to a mouse, this means that the only way that they can navigate through a website is via a keyboard. Ensuring that a sites navigation is easy to use via a keyboard will go a long way to helping make your site more accessible. [Find out more on keyboard accessibility]
TITLE TAG
Ensuring that you have a short and descriptive title tag on all of your sites pages allows visitors to know what the pages content is about, this is especially useful for people using a screen reader.[Title Tags]