Accessibility Matters
What is accessibility?
Simply put, accessibility is about making your content available to as wide an audience as possible, regardless of ability or the method used to access that content. Your site's visitors may not be able to see or hear, be able to distinguish certain colours from each other, be using a text only browser, have a slow internet connection or be using a mobile device with a small screen amongst other things, all of which should be taken into account when developing websites. In practical terms this means things such as:
- Allowing users to adjust the text size in their browser.
- Making sure that the content of the web page makes sense even when all the design elements are removed.
- Ensuring that images that contain important information also have a text description of that information.
- Using colours for text and backgrounds that have enough contrast for the text to be legible to people that don't have normal colour vision.
- If all else fails, providing a plain text alternative of your content (although this should be a last resort).
A website has much more potential than printed material. In order to make a print publication available to a wider audience you would have to create a completely new object, for example, a book with larger print, a braille book or an audio tape, all of which essentially take the same content and present it in a different format for a different audience. When we apply the same process to content on the web it should be easier, after all, computers are meant to make life easier and do some of the heavy lifting for us. If we can take the same web page content and make it available using different web browsers at varying text sizes, text only web browsers, screen readers or devices with smaller screens without altering the original content, we have created the online equivalent of some of those different formats with much less work.
This ability to reuse content for different purposes is often referred to as separating content from presentation. Ideally we need to be able to take the original content and apply a separate presentation layer (or remove the presentation layer completely) to it depending on the way the content is being accessed. For example, we need to alter the way the content looks depending on whether someone is using a standard sized computer screen or a mobile phone, we need to ensure that a screen reader (a device that will read out the content of a web page) takes the content of the page in the right order and understands what the different parts of the page are. Additionally it is important that we give users the ability to control the appearance of a web page when using their own web browser.
Why is accessibility currently an issue?
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Evolving Technology
The underlying technologies used to create websites have evolved to a point where it is now possible to a large degree to separate content from presentation which is a good starting point to begin to address accessibility. In the past the technology was used by designers in ways it was never meant to be used to exercise control over the way a web page looked which led to a lot of practices that were detrimental to accessibility. Some of these practices still persist today but there is a gradual move away from this to a more standards based style of development.
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Awareness of accessibility issues
There is a growing awareness of the issues involved amongst web developers, partly due to an active accessibility community.
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Disability Discrimination Act
Websites in the UK come under the Disability Discrimination Act, which makes it against the law to provide a service via your website that is inaccessible to disabled users. What this means in practice is unclear as the law is unspecific about how accessibility is measured. The most commonly quoted guidelines are the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines developed by the World Wide Web Consortium. These are addressed in more detail below. To date no UK website has been sued but there have been several high profile cases outside the UK.
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Hand Held Devices
Accessibility isn't just about disabled users, it's also about making content available to everyone including those using mobile phones or other hand held devices. The use of these devices is growing at a rapid pace and more and more people will be accessing your content from something other than a computer.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) contain practical advice on making web pages accessible to people with disabilities as well as those accessing your pages using different devices. The guidelines contain a list of checkpoints that web pages should be implementing, or working towards, in order to make them accessible.
The guidelines are separated into three priorities:
Priority 1
A Web content developer must satisfy this checkpoint. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it impossible to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint is a basic requirement for some groups to be able to use Web documents.
Priority 2
A Web content developer should satisfy this checkpoint. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it difficult to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint will remove significant barriers to accessing Web documents.
Priority 3
A Web content developer may address this checkpoint. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it somewhat difficult to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint will improve access to Web documents.
Some examples of level one compliance are:
- Not conveying information solely with colour
- Not using images to convey information without providing the same information with text. (Although this sounds like you shouldn't be using images on your pages, text can be added within the code of a web page that conveys information about the image.)
- Allow documents to still be accessible without the presentation layer. This means that it should still be possible to access the text of a website without all the styling that has been added by designers.
- Use the clearest and simplest language appropriate for a site's content.
- and as a last resort: If, after best efforts, you cannot create an accessible page, provide a link to an alternative page that uses W3C technologies, is accessible, has equivalent information (or functionality), and is updated as often as the inaccessible (original) page.
Levels two and three introduce increasingly difficult to implement features.
These are just some examples of the things developers should be thinking about when building websites and whilst it is difficult to implement all the recommendations contained in the guidelines it is important to be aware of the issues involved and work towards creating content that is as accessible as possible.
Usability
How easy to use is your website? Can your visitors easily find what they are looking for? Is your navigation intuitive?
At Quorange, we put an emphasis on all these elements to enhance your site's usability.
Simplicity
There is a tendency in web development to make sites overly complicated, implementing features that don't always add value. We believe a better approach is to keep development simple, concentrating on the main functions of a website adding more complexity as it's required without compromising its main purpose.
Services
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Contact
Whether you're looking for a one page site, an ecommerce catalogue or need to update your existing site, we're happy to discuss your requirements
Telephone us on 0161 408 4192 or use this form to contact us and we'll get back to you.