Web accessibility refers to the practice of making websites usable to everyone, regardless of their abilities or technology they use. Your website might be accessed by any person and from any device; if it hasn't been created in the right way, it may not display properly on some devices (like older browsers or mobile phones) or may be unusable by certain groups (such as people with poor vision or people with reduced mobility who use a keyboard to navigate websites rather than a mouse). If your content isn't accessible to everyone, you run the risk of alienating people and losing potential customers. Having an accessible website reduces the barriers faced by many people who try to access information and services online.
Auditing your Website for Accessibility
Auditing your website for accessibility involves validating its content and functionality against each guideline of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0). WCAG 2.0 has three levels of conformance, A, AA and AAA, and each guideline is assigned one of these levels based on that guideline's impact on accessibility. As an analogy, think of an exam that has a mixture of distinction, honours and pass questions. Answering all of the pass questions correctly will result in a pass grade, answering all of the pass and hononurs questions will result in an honour, while answering all of the questions correctly will result in a distinction. The pass, honour and distinction are equivalent to the A, AA and AAA levels of conformance.
An Example Accessibility Guideline
Section 1.4 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines concerns the colours that are displayed on a webpage and their impact on accessibility.
- A level A guideline from this section (guideline 1.4.1) recommends that colour is not used as the only visual means of conveying information (i.e. that words are underlined or bolded for emphasis, rather than only being coloured differently from other words). This guideline ensures that highlighted words will be apparent on displays that don't use colour but also to people using regular displays who have difficulty distinguishing colours. This, like many of the level A guidelines, is not difficult to implement; we can ensure that bold or italic formatting is used for any of the words on our website that we want to emphasise.
- A level AA guideline from the same section (guideline 1.4.3) recommends that text on a page has a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1. This line of text has a contrast ratio less than 3.5:1 and doesn't meet the standard. To pass guideline 1.4.3, all of the text on your website needs to have medium to high contrast which can be difficult to ensure and can cause some design constrictions; level AA guidelines like these are more difficult to implement.
- Lastly, a level AAA guideline from the section (guideline 1.4.6) recommends that the contrast ratio should be at least 7:1. All of the text on a level AAA compliant website must have at least as much contrast as this text. This is a more restrictive version of the last recommendation and more difficult to ensure again, particularly when colours other than black and white are being used to display text on a page.
Conforming to the WCAG standard means that all of the guidelines at a particular level of the standard are met. For level A conformance, a webpage satisfies all level A guidelines, for level AA conformance, all level A and level AA guidelines are satisifed, and for level AAA conformance, all level A, AA and AAA guidelines are satisifed. Conformance level A is a basic requirement for some groups to be able to use Web documents, conformance to level AA will remove significant barriers to accessing Web documents, while conformance to level AAA improves access to Web documents for all people and devices.
After we've audited your site for accessibility, validating your content against each of the guidelines, we'll compile a detailed report stating which level of conformance your website currently has (if any), which guidelines it fails to meet, and the steps that are necessary for your website to achieve A, AA and AAA conformance. You can then decide which of these steps you'd like to have implemented.
The Benefits of an Accessible Website
Accessibility doesn't just concern people with disabilities, it concerns all devices and browsers used to access online information so affects everyone. The biggest advantage of having an accessible website is that you won't alienate any of your visitors, regardless of their abilities or the technology they use. Accessible websites are viewable from any kind of device and are specifically designed with ease of use as a priority. In addition, many of the changes needed to make a website more accessible will have a positive knock-on effect on the websites performance in search engines, such as putting intuitive navigation in place, having a uniform structure to each page and properly labeling embedded multimedia with alternative text descriptions. Accessible sites can still make full use of modern browser technologies like Javascript and embedded multimedia, but will degrade gracefully when the technologies are not available to end users or switched off.
Why use Beanstalk Web Design?
Some accessibility auditors use software to perform automated accessibility tests on your website, but many accessibility checkpoints cannot be verified by software alone and require human judgement. When we complete an accessibility audit or create a WCAG compliant website, we manually verify each checkpoint and produce detailed accessibility reports in line with the WCAG recommendations. These reports reference each and every guideline and give a full, easily understood explanation where a page or site fails to meet them, so you will see for yourself exactly how your website conforms or not to the guidelines.
If you would like more information on accessible websites and accessibility audits, please dont hesitate to get in touch.