What is Web Accessibility?

Web accessibility is about making your website work correctly for people with disabilities so that everyone can perceive, understand, navigate and interact with your content. To some degree, web accessibility will affect everyone at some point in our lives. It might not be something that you’ve ever considered or known about before, but it will be having an impact on your business and here’s why:

16% of the world’s population have a disability, that’s 1.3 billion people, and if your website isn’t implemented correctly, then these visitors may not be able to buy your product, read your article, or contact you or your company.

Who Does It Affect?

So what types of disabilities are we talking about?

Vision

You may have users who are blind, have low vision or are colour-blind visiting your site. They will rely on an accessibility tool, a screen reader, while people with poor vision will need the contrast on your site to be accurate to read the words.

For the screen reader to work, it will rely on your site being implemented correctly, for example, it will need sufficient alt text for images, clearly labelled form fields and obvious links so the user knows what page they are clicking onto.

Hearing

People suffering from hearing loss or are completely deaf. Any videos or audio will impact these visitors and will be useless to them if they do not have captions, audio descriptions or transcripts.

Mobility

These include people with paralysis, limited sensation or a lack of fine motor skills that make using a mouse difficult so they rely on the keyboard and other assistive technologies. This means your site needs to work correctly so the user can interact with all the features on your site, for example, with just the keyboard. I’ve encountered many sites where simply the navigation is not accessible when trying to tab onto it using the keyboard, it’s very frustrating!

For these users, it also means that any call-to-action buttons must be the correct size to be easily clicked without causing errors or frustration to the user.

Cognition

This includes people who have epilepsy, dyslexia, a learning disability, autism and ADHD. For many, a flexible website ensures that they can change it to suit their needs, whether it’s enlarging the font, turning off flashing images, or changing the theme of the website from light to dark mode, these all help the user to read and understand the text of a website correctly. My husband is dyslexic and finds it much easier to read a website with a dark theme. It is also important to use clear and simple language for all to understand.

It Can Also Affect You And Me

Earlier I mentioned that web accessibility will affect everyone. This is because not only does it help people with disabilities, but also:

Older people with changing abilities due to ageing

If we’re lucky enough to reach old age, then this will happen to all of us at some stage. Some examples include sight loss, limitations of muscular control and also the loss of hearing.

People with temporary disabilities

You may have a broken arm and can no longer use a mouse so have to rely on a keyboard working correctly on a site. You may also lose your glasses and therefore need to enlarge the text on a site for you to read how to order new ones!

People with situational limitations

If you’re outside looking at a website, you may have trouble reading the text due to bright sunlight. Or if you’re in a loud environment and cannot hear audio, you’ll need to rely on captions to understand what is being said.

People using mobile phones or other devices

If you're using a smaller screen to read a site’s content, you may also struggle if the website is not accessible.

So now you understand what web accessibility is, and how it doesn’t just impact people with disabilities but potentially you and me, and should be seen as an opportunity to increase your customers rather than a cost.