In the increasingly digital landscape of our lives, where work, shopping and access to local council services occur online, the prevalence of websites has expanded to encompass businesses from both the private and public sectors, highlighting the critical need for universal understanding of accessibility and the implementation of measures to ensure inclusivity on our websites.
Accessibility is a term that’s become a lot more common in the digital space in recent years. So much of our daily lives now takes place online, from work, to shopping, to using local council services.
That means almost every business today now has a website, including both private sector and public sector organisations. For that reason, it’s crucial that we all understand accessibility and take steps to make our websites accessible for everyone.
According to The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C): “Web accessibility means that websites, tools, and technologies are designed and developed so that people with disabilities can use them. More specifically, people can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the web and contribute to the web.”
A large focus of accessibility for websites and apps is to help make the experience of using technology easier for people with some form of disability. This includes people with:
Accessibility is about universality, and its purpose is to make technology easier to use for everyone. There’s currently around 14.6 million people with a registered disability in the UK, but there are many more people who can find it challenging to use technology such as websites or a mobile app.
For instance, someone with a temporary injury, like a broken arm in a cast, or someone whose eyesight is deteriorating to the point of struggling to read small text on a computer screen.
Being accessible means ensuring your website or mobile app can be used by as many people as possible. To achieve this, your website’s content and design must be clear and simple, and should be compatible with various adjustments certain people might need to make.
Essentially, it’s about making sure as many people as possible, no matter their physical ability, location, or circumstances, can access and interact with your online content and digital services.
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WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) is an international standard developed by the W3 Consortium, in conjunction with individuals and organisations across the world, that is designed to explain how to make content more accessible to those with disabilities.
The most recent iteration of the WCAG highlights four main principles that should be in place to ensure a website is deemed accessible for all users. All organisations, across both the private and public sectors, should be proactively working to have their websites) follow these principles and uphold the standards for accessibility.
The WCAG standards have 12-13 guidelines. For each guideline, there are testable success criteria. The success criteria are at three levels: A, AA, and AAA. The success criteria are what determine “conformance” to WCAG. That is, in order to meet WCAG, the content needs to meet the success criteria.
You can find full detailed guidance, explaining how to put these principles into practice, on the W3C website.
It’s been extremely positive to see accessibility becoming more of a priority for businesses in recent years. For many, that has been driven by a genuine moral desire to offer an inclusive, accessible experience to those with disabilities.
However, businesses may be more driven by the requirements and regulations that now dictate the necessary level of accessibility for organisations. These regulations will differ depending on whether you operate within the private sector or the public sector.
The regulations mean that any organisation with a website or a mobile app is required to make reasonable adjustments to ensure their sites are accessible to people with disabilities.
In the UK, the Equality Act 2010 requires you to anticipate the needs of potential disabled customers for those reasonable adjustments, and that’s why it’s so important to raise awareness for all the various people with accessibility needs.
If your organisation operates within the public sector, and your website or mobile app doesn’t meet the necessary accessibility requirements, you could be breaking the law.
Since 2019, UK-based public sector organisations have faced stricter regulations. You’re now required to publish a statement as evidence that you’ve met the accessibility requirements and are compliant with the WCAG 2.1.
If you are outside the UK, you can find more information about the regulations affecting you in this Web Usability article.
While the primary goal of accessibility for websites is to benefit people with disabilities, there are also advantages to be gained from a business perspective, such as:
To help create a more inclusive, equal, and accessible experience for anyone visiting your website, we’ve listed some simple tips.
If you want to go above and beyond to ensure your website is truly accessible for everyone, our top tip is to test it with an audience of people who have real disabilities and a wide range of needs.
Remember that not all websites that comply with the WCAG are accessible for everyone. Simply being compliant with the guidelines won’t provide you with empathy or understanding for the real-life challenges some people face when using technology.
In order to make significant steps forward with accessibility, hold one-on-one testing sessions with people who require support. Ask for their feedback to identify problems that aren’t covered in the WCAG, and ask their advice to help resolve any issues with accessibility.
We worked closely with our partners at Web Usability to put together an extensive guide. Aiming to help modern-day marketers adhere to accessibility guidelines and standards.
WordPress is the most popular platform in the world for building websites, for both small and large businesses alike. It currently powers 45% of all websites on the Internet. With that in mind, it’s worth looking at how WordPress as a CMS helps facilitate accessibility for its users.
Web accessibility in the UK is covered in the Equality Act 2010, which protects all individuals from unfair treatment and promotes a fair and more equal society.
WordPress is a great platform if accessibility is a priority for you, your business, and your audience. It’s an open-source platform with a fantastic developer community supporting it, which means that people are able to provide helpful updates to the technology to improve it for everyone.
The WordPress community has been working hard in recent years to ensure the platform makes it easy to build websites that are as inclusive and accessible as possible.
In fact, WordPress’s team has created an annual event to celebrate accessibility within WordPress, called WordPress Accessibility Day. This 24-hour event recently took place during November, featuring a wealth of insightful, constructive sessions from technology and accessibility experts.
As a digital agency, here at Filter we recognise the value that WordPress provides in this area and it is our key content management system recommendation.
During our initial Discovery and Definition period, we work with clients to determine their required success criteria for accessibility, and what level we should be achieving – for instance, A, AA, or AAA.
We then develop the website or mobile app to the required standard during design and development, ensuring that we meet the relevant guidelines for the criteria.
For instance, during design, we will focus on ensuring that the website is easy to use, has clear signage and items such as colour contrast meet the standards.
In development, we focus on producing semantic HTML that can be parsed and easily understood by screen-readers, and ensuring that ‘hidden’ tags such as ARIA and ALT, that provide additional context to users with impaired eyesight, are set up and configured correctly.
Web accessibility in the UK is covered in the Equality Act 2010, which protects all individuals from unfair treatment and promotes a fair and more equal society.
We don’t just rely upon our ability to look at a site and tick a box to meet the guidelines.
In the design phase we use tools such as Stark, which plugs directly into Figma, and ensures that the the colours we are employing for the design do not cause any contrast issues using resources like https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/
During development, we evaluate the work we are doing in an ongoing manner using the WAVE Evolution Chrome plug-in.
Finally, we put the sites that we develop to the test using tools such as SortSite, which runs a full scan of every single page on a site and highlights any potential issues where the guidelines are not being met.
This process is completed during the initial QA phase, when we have loaded in draft content for users to test with. Once the full content load is complete on UAT, we then perform a second scan to check if anything has changed as the content has been added.
Manual testing, including using a screen reader and keyboard navigation, is crucial to ensure a fully accessible experience.
The results of each scan are available as both Word and Excel documents, providing both Filter and clients with the ability to see where mitigations need to be put in place. These results are graded in terms of severity – from highest to lowest, and with information for items that have no strict classification awarded.
Filter also partners with agencies that have specialist knowledge of accessibility and usability issues, and can provide further support by testing to an enhanced level.
Here is a list of links to accessibility guidelines and resources which can use to create more accessible and inclusive digital experiences for all users
