The Basics of Web Accessibility

Tips and tools to improve our websites and make them more accessible

What is Web Accessibility?

Web Accessibility is the process of designing and building applications so that they can be perceived, understood, and interacted with by everyone. When we talk about web accessibility, there are 5 personal characteristics that we should try to account for:

• Speech impairment
• Hearing impairment
• Vision impairments (blindness, color blindness, and other vision impairments)
• Motor control limitations
• Cognitive limitations

When we build our websites and applications, we want to make sure that anyone with these personal characteristics is able to use them.

How do I know if my website is accessible?

So how can we assess how accessible our websites are? WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), is a series of success criteria that we can use to assess the text, images, sounds, and HTML structure/markup of our webpage.
WCAG contains a series of success criteria that we should aim to meet. A simple example success criterion is “all functionality is operable through a keyboard interface”.

WCAG has 3 certification levels:

• Level A is the minimum level. Reaching this level requires meeting all criteria which are baseline, show stopper criterion for web accessibility.
• Level AA includes all Level A and AA requirements. Many organizations strive to meet this level.
• Level AAA includes all Level A, AA, and AAA requirements. This level is typically reserved for websites and apps that are targeted towards disability markets, for example, all videos include sign-language interpretation

A WebAIM report analyzing homepages on the web found that 97.8% of home pages had automatically detectable WCAG 2 AA failures. This shows we all have a long way to go!

There are a number of tools for analyzing your webpage and its WCAG compliance. Tools are a really helpful way of embedding good accessibility practices…