In this blog, we will discuss what accessibility is, why its needed and how it should be part of the web development.
What is accessibility?
Accessibility is about making our website usable for everyone. Our website should be accessible on mobile devices, on slow network connections and by people with disabilities. Just like the infrastructure these days have a ramp for wheel chair for easy access, our websites should also provide an equal opportunity to everyone irrespective of their ability.
Benefits of accessibility?
- Use of semantics in HTML makes your website more searchable as it improves SEO.
- Your site is complaint as accessibility is required by law in some countries.
- More hits as the website caters to a wider audience.
- Improves your reputation.
Types of disabilities
- Visual impairments – These include people with total blindness, color blindness or low level vision. Although web browsers have zoom capabilities, few people depend on screen readers such as JAWS and NVDA which are software tools that read the text aloud.
- Hearing impairment – These include people with hearing loss. For websites that contain audio or videos, alternate text or transcripts should be provided.
- Mobility impairment – These include people with difficulty in hand movement or with hardware limitations like non availability of a mouse. To mitigate this, websites should be key board accessible where website navigation can be done through the keyboard with just the tab key.
Making accessibility part of your project
Implementing accessibility into a project at the end of the development life cycle would lead to rework and additional costs. Hence, accessibility should be part of the development and unit testing phase. Accessibility testing should be part of the testing phase including automation if any. Any issue with accessibility reported should be treated on par with any other bug/defect and should be mitigated.
The best place to start with accessibility is with the HTML itself. Using the correct semantics could solve a lot of accessibility issues. The semantic HTML elements have built in key board accessibility where website navigation can be done through the keyboard.
For more complex websites, the W3C has come up with a specification called WAI-ARIA(Web Accessibility Initiative – Accessible Rich Internet Applications) which defines a set of additional attributes that can be applied to HTML elements to improve accessibility.
Accessibility testing should be part of your project testing phase. Some of the assistive technologies such as screen readers (JAWS or NVDA) and browser plugins such as the AXE tool can help in catching accessibility issues early in the project life cycle.
Conclusion
Although achieving 100% accessibility might not be possible, we should strive to make our website as accessible as possible. It’s a collective responsibility of developers, testers and the website owners to make it possible.
