We’ve already been living a substantial portion of our life online, but with consumer behavior going digital at an accelerated rate today, the question of web accessibility is more important than ever.
Decades ago, wheelchair ramps, braille on signs and flashing lights on fire alarms all became standard thanks to the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. But today, the new frontier for equal access is the web. Websites have become one of the most important resources in our daily lives, yet many people still live without full access. In the U.S. alone, 10.5% of adults live with a vision or hearing impairment. That doesn’t include people who have mobility or cognitive impairments that can also make most websites difficult to use.
Fortunately, there are reasonable accommodations websites can make to ensure they’re usable, even for people who see, hear, process or navigate the web differently.
Most people may not be able to tell whether a website is “accessible” at a glance. Web accessibility looks different to different people, and to some, it might even be invisible. It can be hard to spot because while a website could read fine to one person, it may be incompatible with screen readers. Or a seemingly harmless combination of font and background colors could make text unreadable for someone with colorblindness.
However, having an ADA-compliant website isn’t just about preventing a potential lawsuit — it makes sites easier to use, more intuitive and more useful for everyone. Chances are, you’ve turned on captions when you can’t turn the volume up or used voice-to-text to send a message with your hands full. These are a couple of accessible features that those with and without disabilities take advantage of every day.
Web accessibility benefits everyone — your business included — by ensuring every individual in your audience can reach information about you, your service or product. Businesses may even increase their usability and SEO rankings by having an accessible site, without boxing up your branding or your messaging.
So if web accessibility isn’t always obvious to the majority, how do you check to make sure your site is accessible to people who experience it differently?
The most current Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) are published by members of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), a part of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). W3C is an international community dedicated to improving the web, and the guidelines in WCAG 2.0 have hundreds of knowledgeable researchers and contributors behind them.
To help organize the basic ideas of web accessibility, WCAG 2.0 is based on four pillars of compliance: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust (POUR).
In each of these categories, there are also three levels of compliance a site can achieve:
What’s the level of compliance your site needs to meet? One answer is to say that it depends on your industry or what level of protection you want against potential lawsuits. But that isn’t the full picture. Only certain industries are held to Level AAA, but that doesn’t mean aiming for the highest standard for accessibility isn’t appropriate for everyone. Remember, the point isn’t just compliance — it’s access. The goal is to include people who might otherwise be kept out of your website, by designing it with them in mind.
Where would you guess that your website falls in the levels of web compliance? This quick checklist of some Level A compliance standards can give you an idea.
If you checked off everything, you meet a portion of Level A requirements for web accessibility, and your strides make your site more accessible for all! But there’s much more work worth doing. Reaching Level AA standards (or even Level AAA, if your industry requires it) can help you not only avoid expensive lawsuits but also improve your site’s usability and reach your full audience.
And that takes a team. Accessibility is a multifaceted issue involving visual design, code, UX and writing. It’s not a job for one person. So if you don’t necessarily have that diverse range of expertise available on your team, an agency partner with experience in performing and resolving complete ADA audits can take your site accessibility and inclusivity to the next level.
For a full accessibility audit of your site, or to get more information on how we can help you build an accessible site from bottom to top, contact us!
The original version of this page was published at: https://www.hilemangroup.com/Thought-Leadership/Hilelights-Blog/Why-Web-Accessibility
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