Accessible all areas: why you need to design your website for all users

Website accessibility is a term that’s often discussed, but can you define it precisely? Essentially, it means designing and developing websites that everyone can use, including people with disabilities (such as visual, auditory, motor, or cognitive impairments) or those who use screen readers – software that reads aloud content on a screen, converting it into audio or Braille.

The ultimate aim is for everybody to understand, navigate and interact with your site effectively, regardless of their abilities.

Here’s why this is so important:

Ethics

Apart from anything else, ensuring everyone can participate equally in the digital world is the right thing to do, as it includes anyone with a disability, whether temporary or permanent, as well as older people and those with certain types of older technology. Ultimately, accessibility enhances the overall user experience for all visitors to your website. It also contributes to your reputation as a socially responsible business.

Legal compliance

Many countries have accessibility standards that website owners must meet. Lawsuits, fines, and reputational harm can result for those who fail to comply. This means this issue is not just something that’s ‘nice to have’ – in the UK, it’s a legal requirement for private and public sector organisations. The UK bases its laws on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These guidelines outline how to make your website more accessible to individuals with disabilities. If you measure your site’s accessibility against WCAG compliance standards, you can determine whether it would withstand legal scrutiny.

The three tiers of WCAG compliance are A, AA and AAA, with Level AA generally recognised as the one to aim for.

The main piece of legislation is the Equality Act 2010. The UK could also transpose the European Accessibility Act (EAA) into national law, but we don’t know whether that will happen.

What are the basic principles of web accessibility?

According to WCAG, there are four key principles, sometimes summarised as POUR:

• Perceivable: Everyone should be able to see and read your content accurately.
• Operable: Content should be responsive, and all users should be able to navigate their way around your site, for example using keyboard-only commands.
• Understandable: Language should be easily understood, with interfaces and information presented so everyone can use and navigate them.
• Robust: Sites should be compatible with a broad range of tech, including assistive technology solutions.

What type of content should be accessible?

This list includes, but is not limited to:

• Titles: Page titles should be informative and descriptive.
• Contrast: There should be enough colour contrast for people with visual impairments.
• Text: This should retain its quality when someone zooms in on it.
• Seizure triggers: Avoid flashing or blinking content.
• Skip features: Help those with assistive technology to skip through pages’ repetitive elements so they can read more quickly.
• Readability: Have accessible fonts and format content logically, using headings allowing skimming, and write in a way your target audience will understand easily.
• PDFs: Tag these to make them accessible.
• Colour: Don’t rely on this alone to indicate meaning. Or, if you do, incorporate a text alternative.
• Video and audio: Include a text alternative, such as transcripts or captions.
• Forms: Label these properly, including text fields, checkboxes and dropdown lists.
• Tables: These need extra mark-up – make them accessible to screen readers with row and column header cells.
• Descriptive links: All link text should make sense when read in isolation – generic words such as ‘learn more’ and ‘click here’ give screen reader users no context.
• Alternative text: Images and similar non-text content should have descriptive alternative (alt) text so a screen reader can interpret them.
• Semantic mark-up: Follow a logical page structure, for example identify headings as H1 and then keep the structure clear with H2 and H3 headings and so on.

How to meet accessibility requirements

As mentioned, WCAG level AA is the standard to aim for. An initial accessibility audit will identify areas for improvement.

Publish an accessibility statement – this is a requirement for public sector websites, but is good practice for all businesses.

Essentially, accessibility is an ongoing process, not a one-off project. So it’s never finished! Run frequent checks and test all new content, redesigns and migrations. If possible, get users with disabilities to road-test website changes.

Website accessibility with SWSweb

At SWSweb, we’ve been helping all kinds of businesses with website support since 2012. We offer various maintenance packages and other services, but also develop and build WordPress, Joomla and other websites for all sizes of organisation.

So we have a good understanding of how to make your website fully compliant and accessible. We use plain English – and will be upfront and honest about what we can and can’t do for your website. Ask us for a free quote today.