With over 1 billion people worldwide living with a disability (according to the World Health Organization), implementing website accessibility best practices can show you how to tap into this vast audience and create a positive user experience for everybody.
It’s price mentioning that website accessibility doesn’t only apply to people living with disabilities – but your entire user base.
Regardless, achieving true accessibility requires collaboration with relevant stakeholders.
In this text, you’ll discover website accessibility best practices and how to effectively collaborate with stakeholders to ensure everyone can use your website.
What Are the three Website Accessibility Standards?
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are essentially the most widely known accessibility standards. While other guidelines exist for authoring tools (ATAG) and user agents (UAAG), WCAG is primarily used to make web content accessible.
What are the Core Principles of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines?
The WCAG is built on 4 core principles, often remembered by the acronym POUR: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust. These principles provide a framework for creating web sites which can be accessible to everyone, no matter ability.
- Perceivable: Provide alternative text for images, captions for videos, and clear headings for screen readers.
- Operable: Ensure the provision of keyboard navigation, focus indicators, and skip-to-content links.
- Understandable: Use plain language, consistent navigation, and error messages.
- Robust: Build web sites which can be compatible with assistive technologies.
Website Accessibility Best Practices
A. Content
- Use clear and concise language: Avoid technical jargon and complex sentence structures. Also, aim for a writing style that is simple to understand for users with a spread of reading abilities.
- Structure your content: Use headings and subheadings. Headings act like signposts. They guide users through the content and help them find information easily.
- Provide descriptive alternative text (alt text) for all images: Alt text tells screen readers what the image is about. This allows users who’re blind or visually impaired to understand the context of the image.
- Use semantic HTML when structuring your content: Semantic HTML elements like headings (<h1>, <h2>, etc.), paragraphs (<p>), and lists (<ul>, <ol>) convey meaning beyond just visual presentation. This helps screen readers interpret the content accurately and allows for a more accessible user experience.
B. Design
- Ensure sufficient color contrast between text and background elements: Low contrast could make text difficult to read – especially for users with visual impairments. Therefore, it’s good to use online tools like WebAIM Contrast Checker or Stark to check your color contrast ratios. When using these tools, aim for a ratio of no less than 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for giant text or daring text.
- Choose clear and readable fonts: Avoid overly decorative or script fonts that might be hard to read – especially for users with dyslexia or low vision. So go for clean, sans-serif fonts with good legibility at various sizes.
- Make interactive elements like buttons and links easily identifiable: Use clear labels, distinct visual cues (like hover effects), and sufficient size to ensure users can easily understand and interact with these elements.
C. Functionality
- Ensure keyboard navigation is feasible for all elements in your website: This will enable users who depend on keyboards to navigate – akin to those with motor impairments or who use screen readers – to access all interactive elements, including links, buttons, and forms.
- Provide transcripts and captions for audio and video content: This allows users who’re deaf or hard of hearing, or just anyone who prefers text-based information, to access the content and understand its message.
- Use descriptive labels for forms and input fields: Labels should clearly explain what information is required in each field. This makes it easier for users to fill out forms accurately.
D. Testing
Regularly test your website with assistive technologies and real-life users to discover and address accessibility issues.
E. Compliance
Understand and implement relevant accessibility standards like WCAG to ensure a powerful foundation for an accessible website.
F. Mobile Accessibility
Optimize your website for mobile devices since a few of your users could also be visiting your site from their mobile phones. Optimizing for mobile accessibility includes ensuring touch targets are large enough, using appropriate text sizes, and avoiding content that requires precise gestures.
Note: All the above website accessibility best practices aren’t only relevant to your internal team when constructing the location. It’s great to share it along with your QA and other testing teams, in addition to clients, reviewers, etc – in order that they know what to look out for and test.
How to Test and Validate Your Website’s Accessibility
Verifying your website’s accessibility is crucial to ensure a very inclusive user experience. Here’s a breakdown of key testing and validation methods:
Assistive Technology Testing
Assistive technology testing involves using tools like screen readers, screen magnifiers, and voice control software to experience your website from the attitude of users with disabilities.
This firsthand approach helps discover accessibility barriers which may go unnoticed with traditional testing methods – like keyboard navigation, missing alternative text descriptions for images, unclear screen reader output, and compatibility problems with assistive technologies.
User Testing with People (with Disabilities)
User testing with real-life users (including individuals with disabilities) goes beyond technical checks and provides real-world insights into how users with various impairments experience your website. Observing users navigate your site and gathering their feedback can reveal usability challenges and areas for improvement you may not have anticipated.
Accessibility Testing Tools
Automated accessibility testing tools can scan your website’s code and discover common accessibility issues like missing alt text, insufficient color contrast errors, and broken keyboard navigation.
This helps save time and resources by routinely identifying potential accessibility problems.
Some of those tools include Axe by Deque, Lighthouse (by Google), and AVE (WebAIM Wave).
WCAG Conformance Validation
WCAG conformance validation involves testing your website against these guidelines to confirm its level of accessibility. WCAG conformance demonstrates your commitment to accessibility best practices and allows you to benchmark your website’s accessibility against established standards.
You can outsource this task to organizations that provide WCAG conformance testing services, or you should utilize self-evaluation tools to assess your website’s conformance.
How to Build A Collaborative Process to Ensure Website Accessibility
Appoint an Accessibility Champion
Appoint an Accessibility Champion who can spearhead the collaborative effort, provide training sessions, and act as a central resource for other stakeholders looking for guidance on accessibility best practices.
This dedicated champion can ensure accessibility stays a top priority throughout the web site development process.
Set clear goals and timelines for accessibility improvements
Establish clear goals and realistic timelines – considering the needs of all stakeholders. Setting measurable accessibility objectives and outlining timelines for implementation ensures consistent progress toward a more accessible website.
Identify stakeholders involved in website creation and maintenance
Identify all these key players and foster communication and stakeholder collaboration amongst them. Some crucial team members to consider include developers, designers, content creators, project managers, QA testers, SMEs, clients, marketing and website positioning, users, etc.
Define roles and responsibilities for every stakeholder in accessibility
A successful collaborative approach requires assigning clear roles and responsibilities to each stakeholder involved in website accessibility. By clearly defining these roles and responsibilities, you possibly can ensure everyone on the team understands their part in creating an accessible website. This fosters accountability and empowers each stakeholder to contribute their expertise towards a shared goal of inclusivity.
Establish ongoing training and awareness programs
Organize training sessions and encourage stakeholders to take part in them. These sessions can cover the most recent accessibility guidelines (WCAG), best practices for various elements of web development (coding, design, content creation), and how to leverage assistive technologies for testing purposes.
Set up an accessibility testing process
Define a transparent process for normal accessibility testing. This process can involve a mix of automated testing tools, manual testing with assistive technologies, and user testing with individuals with disabilities. This multi-method approach helps uncover a wider range of accessibility issues.
Create a Feedback Loop with Users
Create a feedback loop and encourage users to report accessibility barriers they encounter in your website. This worthwhile feedback helps discover issues missed during testing.
Some steps to take include providing multiple channels for reporting – like a feedback form, email, or social media.
Use visual review and feedback tools that enable everyone to collaborate in a single place
While a powerful collaborative approach is crucial, there are also technological solutions that may streamline accessibility testing efforts and foster communication amongst team members.
You may have already got existing tools to your accessibility testing that you just use with internal team members. But how do you collaborate with SMEs and clients, in addition to users – in a single place?
You need a central design feedback and QA review tool to do this. Some of those tools – like zipBoard – easily integrate along with your testing tools and ensure everyone can review the live site, detect issues, and provide feedback on the platform. You, however, can even review that feedback, prioritize, and assign for resolution – in the identical place.
Monitor and update accessibility compliance
Allow regular website audits by QA testers to ensure compliance with evolving accessibility standards. Consequently, developers can fix identified issues to maintain an inclusive website for everybody.
Next Steps
Start making your website accessible today! Even small changes could make an enormous difference.
While you’re at it, in case you wish a central hub to collaborate with each internal and external stakeholders in a single place and also track issues and manage tasks, try zipBoard without cost today.
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