Creating A Culture Of Accessibility

Our team have always been passionate about the WordPress community and as a remote-first agency, it’s important to us that we make an active effort to foster an inclusive and accessible culture.

We enjoyed watching sessions from WordPress Accessibility Day 2022 which took place earlier this week. The 24-hour virtual event aims to simplify accessibility and educate WordPress users on its importance.

“Our mission is to demystify website accessibility for WordPress developers, designers, content creators, and users so that they can more easily build websites that work for everyone, regardless of ability.” – wpaccessibility.day

Over 1,400 attendee’s registered for WPAD22 and each session featured closed captions and a live interpreter. The event showcased a wide variety of expert speakers on a range of relevant topics and issues.

Keynote speaker, Nicolas Steenhout, is an experienced accessibility consultant, who offered an interesting metaphor. Nicolas explained that your approach to accessibility can be seen as a blueberry muffin, if you make your muffins first and then add your blueberries, it’s unlikely to work out well. However, if you add the blueberries during the baking process, you will create some delicious blueberry muffins.

One of the key takeaways here is that we should keep accessibility in mind along the way when creating (or updating) a website, rather than trying to do it once the project is completed. If we can teach ourselves to do this, we can work towards a ‘culture of accessibility’ that aims to eliminate ableism (the discrimination of those with a disability).

Nicolas explained how he had known various colleagues who experienced an accessibility issue, including:

• A blind colleague who couldn’t interpret website images due to there being no ALT text, all they could hear from their screen reader was ‘image’, ‘image’, ‘image’. This could have been easily fixed by including some ALT text while uploading the images.
• A deaf colleague who couldn’t install a printer as the instructions were put onto a CD in video form, with no audio or accompanying text. The colleague could have installed the printer if they’d had the proper instructions but they weren’t provided in an accessible format.
• A consumer who found the website in question too distracting, as they have ADHD and the colours/design caused a sensory overload, making the site impossible to use. Nicolas created a CSS reset to simplify the website for the consumer to help make it more accessible.

We also enjoyed listening to the session on ALT text with Meg Miller, (Lead Developer at AccessiCart) who worked through some excellent tips. ALT text describes website imagery and is often read aloud by visually impaired users who use a screen reader.

Some of Megs tips included:

• Making sure your ALT text and image captions are different, as they will both be read out loud by a screen reader.
• ALT text should be as descriptive as possible and can include subjective language such as ‘this is a picture of my adorable pet cat’ or ‘a picture of a limited edition collectible in mint condition’.
• Don’t assume your website doesn’t have any users who have a disability, it can be difficult to track this demographic but even your most loyal customer could become visually impaired in the future and require accessibility features.
• ALT text doesn’t take a long time to implement and it can also improve your SEO performance.

There were so many great sessions included within the schedule this year, which are available on demand at the WordPress Accessibility Day website now.

We will definitely be keeping these lessons in mind moving forward and we encourage you to evaluate your approach to accessibility.

To hear more from our team day to day, you can follow our company page on LinkedIn or connect with our CTO Paul Halfpenny and our CEO Oliver Morrison.

If you’d like to find out how we could support your business, make sure to get in touch to organise a convenient time to chat or take a look at our other client stories here.