Why Should You Care if Your Website is Accessible?

Most of us take for granted that when we either want to buy something, look up information, or read a news article etc, we click on a website, we use our mouse to click on the links we want to and everything is there in front of us to use the site correctly.

Now imagine, arriving on your website but you can’t use a mouse so you can only navigate around it using a keyboard. But where is the focus ring? How do you know where you are on the page? Where are you tabbing on to? You only want to be quick but now you can’t even tab onto the navigation bar to get to the page you want to! Can you imagine how frustrating this must be! Or you've just clicked onto a page and you can see the button that you want to press, but with how the website’s been implemented, you've got to now tab through the whole navigation bar again to just get to it! I feel frustrated just thinking about it!

Now, close your eyes, and sit in front of your computer with your website in front of you. Ok, we’re going to make this a little easier for you and allow you to use a screen reader. So you’re tabbing through and the helpful voice is telling you where you are on the page then suddenly you’ve clicked onto an image and it’s talking absolute nonsense to you. This will be because your site hasn’t used alt text and so it’s just reading the saved file name, which more often than not, is a long list of numbers. So how does this help you know what the image is and its relevance to the page? If this happens on every image is it going to make you want to keep using your site? Probably not, so again, your site will have lost a customer. Now to get around the site quickly, you’ve decided to just tab through using the links, and now all the screen reader is saying to you is ‘Click Here’, ‘Click Here’ and ‘Read More’. This means nothing to you nor tells you the page the link will take you to. Would you click on a link just because it’s telling you to but that’s it, no useful information as to what you’ll find on the other side? I don’t think so!

This is just the tip of the iceberg of issues with web accessibility and problems people come up against with a disability. Others include contrast issues where they can’t even read what’s on the page, forms not correctly labelled, unclear error messages, incorrect heading sequences, confusing language and one of the most frustrating problems of all, keyboard traps.

So back to the original question, why should you care? If you are a business with customers using your website and you have these accessibility issues, then there are potential customers who can’t use your website correctly. Therefore, it is impacting your business. 24% of the UK have a disability and that’s not including people who have changing abilities due to ageing, and people with situational disabilities. So, it really is in your best interest to start caring now.