Designing an Accessible Website - Part 2

Having considered the central concepts behind making a website accessible and the overarching reason why accessibility should be a thread that runs through all website builds, the second part of this article covers the potential benefits of accessibility to your organisation and the principles that you will need to factor in to your website builds to ensure that they are accessible.

Benefits
From a business or organisational standpoint there are a series of reasons that advocate making accessibility central to a website build. The W3C broadly categorises these as follows:

• Social Benefits - Accessibility is particularly important for organisations that are socially responsible/have a remit which is promoting a social cause, to boost their reach and the credibility of their cause, as well as being fundamental to those whose sites’ actual target audiences will rely on accessibility measures.
• Technical Benefits - Accessible sites which are consequently more streamlined, simple in their construction and more accurately and efficiently coded can lead to better performance levels and manageable server loads (under high volumes of traffic), increased compatibility with other services and lower maintenance requirements.
• Financial Benefits - There are economies of scale to be benefited from when implementing accessibility standards in the original build of a site as opposed to retro-fitting it at great expense further down the line. As mentioned above accessible sites may be less complex and therefore cheaper to build whilst their simplicity and clarity can also help SEO performance, usability and reduce the cost of maintenance. Additionally, the increased reach and market share of an accessible site across all abilities (as well as mobile and legacy tech users) can bring in higher revenues.
• Legal & Policy - Despite the number of legal cases remaining very low, website accessibility is still driven, although not prescribed, by legislation such as the EU’s Human Rights act and the UK’ Disability and Discrimination Act. Within these frameworks individual companies and organisations can be dictated by policy, from the requirements surrounding government and publicly funded sites to the internal standards of private companies.

Areas to Consider
There are a number of bodies who promote web accessibility and have therefore published guidelines on accessibility but perhaps the most recognised as an ‘industry standard’ is the W3C with their latest set of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0.
The WCAG 2.0 guidelines are constructed around the four basic principles of a site being Perceivable, Operable, Understandable and Robust.

Perceivable - Users with varying abilities should be able to perceive the content on your website either directly, or via assistive technologies, without the loss of meaning or increased difficulty. To achieve this you should consider providing text alternatives for all non-text content to allow visually impaired users to perceive content via screen readers. As a minimum the text alternative for all non-text content should identify what it is but to provide greater accessibility it should go further and replicate the purpose of, and information conveyed by, the original content. Examples include descriptions of visual elements and/or transcripts of videos and audio for greater accessibility.

The content should also be presented (and structure) in a way which can be successfully interpreted in different browsers and assistive technologies, whilst being clearly distinct from its background/surroundings and therefore suffering no visual or audio interference.

Operable - The website should be easy to use, with navigation that is consistent and simple so that users can find their way around the site without confusion, whilst also being navigable using just a keyboard. Furthermore, users should be able to control how much time they have to read content, or use functions, and content should not risk causing the user harm by posing, for example, an epilepsy risk.

Understandable - In accordance with the concept of being perceivable, all users should be able to read all content and it should always appear in predictable and relevant contexts to avoid confusion. In addition, all content should make sense in its context and be informative so that where necessary users will know what they need to do to use the website and its functions successfully and correct any errors that they may encounter.

Robust - Finally, the website should be compatible with, and therefore pose no barriers to, technologies and tools that all ability users may use in conjunction with the web site. Examples of such assistive technologies include screen readers and text only browsers. To this end, standards in coding and mark up (HTML etc) as set by the W3C should be adhered to so that all parts of the website can be interpreted by current and future tools built with these standards in mind.

Bearing in mind the requirements and principles of accessibility throughout all stages of a website build is ultimately worthwhile for a wealth of reasons. It is not only the most efficient way of satisfying the legal requirements of your site but it also plays a vital role in increasing the size and reach of your website as well as significantly advancing your credibility as a socially responsible organisation. With a healthy awareness of the issue far more of the potential of your site can be unleashed.

If you are interested in finding out more about designing accessible websites then you can visit Web Design London