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Posted by Michael on 7th April 2011
Website Accessibility
Have you ever considered how accessible your website is? Maintaining a coherent layout with optimised content is considered essential for a competitive website, but does this alone ensure that it's readable for someone with a visual, hearing, physical, speech or cognitive disability? A percentage of your bouncing visitors could well be turning to your competitors because your website isn't accessible for them.
The problem is that websites are usually created under the assumption that everyone uses a mouse, keyboard and basic internet browser to view them. You may have never actually encountered the peripherals and software that people with disabilities use to interact with computers and websites specifically. Despite this, disabled net users can benefit from the internet in many meaningful ways, and the services of your business could well be one of them.
Setting up an accessible workstation can be as simple as providing a bigger monitor or a larger keyboard for a vision-impaired user. Similarly, most web browsers provide the ability to automatically change font sizes and colour-blind users can use their own style sheets of simply turn them off to ensure maximum colour visibility. More exotic devices provide intelligent solutions to accessibility issues: screen readers can output text via refreshable Braille machines or speech synthesis, speech recognition can allow a user to input data just by speaking and there are various alternative pointers to the standard mouse for people with impaired motion.
These devices, and the software that power them are dependent on standardised layouts, markup and content to operate correctly. In many ways, a web developer simply uses coding elements correctly and for the purposes for which they were originally intended will be halfway to full accessibility already. For example: font-size cannot be automatically adjusted correctly if developers code without using relative values. And tables should be used to contain information, not page layout, as many screen-readers have problems differentiating the two.
The main guideline document, the WCAG 2.0 (Web Content Accessibility Guide) was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a group that seeks to establish standards for the benefit of web developers. Whilst the guidelines have been heavily criticised in the past, they still represent a much needed step in the right direction. Guidelines include:
- Providing Alternative (alt) text for all images or text elements communicated via images.
- Providing proper titles for other design elements like pages, frames, form inputs (via text labels), buttons and embedded multimedia.
- Transcribing, captioning and audio describing Audio and Video.
- Using semantic markup appropriately, e.g. using Heading tags (<h1>, <h2>) instead of indicating headings with font-sizes, underline, italic.
- Avoiding relying on visual cues for in text navigation ('Navigate by clicking on the sun / tallest column')
- Providing clear controls for background audio
- Ensuring that the page remains readable when elements are enlarged (and ensuring they can be enlarged)
- Avoiding use of colour alone to distinguish critical content and links.
- Ensuring that the page is accessible via keyboard alone.
- Automatically updating content can be easily paused.
- No page content should flash more than 3 times per second.
- Providing a 'skip navigation' link at the top of the page that allows screen-readers to skip over the navigation links at the top and left-hand side of a page (which they will otherwise read every single time the page loads).
- The Language used on a page and sections of content in other languages is defined in the markup (<html lang=“en”>).
- Jargon, unusual words and abbreviations should always be defined.
- Input errors should be identified, with adequate labels and instructions for each input element.
- HTML/XHTML are completely valid.
Two things are immediately clear from this list: firstly, that making your website accessible to people with disabilities is actually a process that has little visible consequence and that secondly, an awful lot of making a website accessible is just good coding practice. Most importantly, most of the principles that screen-readers and other accessibility devices work off are similar to those that govern search-engine ranking. Considering that correct markup takes little – if any - extra development time, accessibility is an issue that businesses cannot afford to ignore.
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