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HomeBlogWeb DevelopmentWhat is Web Accessibility? Components. Standards & Examples
The world of the internet today has evolved from the way we used to consume content, gather information, and interact with businesses and consumers. Websites may be designed and developed for various purposes, whether you are a business that wants to reach your customers or a common person, student, or employee who wants to consume some content or information and upgrade themselves.
End users of these websites want to feel comfortable, relatable, and connected while using these websites to achieve this; the website is designed following the web accessibility guidelines.
In this article, we will guide you through website accessibility and teach you what, why, and how of it. You can also browse through our courses and Software Developer course syllabus to up-skill yourself in software development.
Web accessibility is the practice of designing and developing websites and digital content in a way that makes them accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities. This includes ensuring that people with visual, auditory, motor, and cognitive impairments can navigate, interact with, and understand web content, also accessibility should focus on mobile web accessibility, as most people access web content on mobile phones, the internet is an integral part of people's daily lives, and everyone should be able to access the same information and services online, regardless of their abilities.
There are various tools and techniques that web designers and developers can use to create accessible web content, such as providing text alternatives for non-text content, using descriptive headings and links, designing for keyboard navigation, and ensuring that colors and contrast are easily distinguishable.
Web accessibility is crucial for ensuring that everyone, regardless of their abilities, can access and use digital content. It benefits users with disabilities, improves the user experience for all users, and ensures legal compliance and ethical responsibilities. By prioritizing web accessibility, we can create a more inclusive web design and a more equitable digital world.
Making your website accessible should be a priority because it is a fundamental aspect of inclusive design, which strives to make sure that everyone can participate in and benefit from the digital world. Here are some reasons why web page accessibility is crucial:
Website accessibility is not an optional requirement nowadays, it is an absolute necessity that you develop your website with web accessibility. As we have already gained a fair amount of knowledge about accessibility in web design, let us understand by the below points explaining why making websites accessible is important:
To learn more about creating websites and web applications consider enrolling on our Full-stack Web Development courses that offer you in-depth knowledge of creating web applications from development to deployment.
Web accessibility encompasses several components that work together to ensure that digital content is accessible to people with disabilities. Here are some of the key components of web accessibility:
In addition to these four components, web accessibility also involves ensuring that websites are designed and developed with accessibility in mind from the outset. This includes the following accessibility standards, website accessibility testing with assistive technologies, and involving users with disabilities in the design and web accessibility testing processes.
There are four main components of web accessibility listed below that make content web accessible:
Web accessibility standard is defined, maintained and enforced by the members of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WIP) of The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These are the organizations that are responsible for publishing the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
Honestly, there aren’t any laws or punishments to enforce websites to follow the web accessibility standards unless it is a government website, but that doesn’t mean that your website shouldn't be accessible. Websites that are accessible are more likely to have more visitors and rank better, additionally just because web accessibility isn’t a formal law doesn’t mean your website will avoid a lawsuit. There are multiple cases in which companies had to face lawsuits for lacking an accessible website.
Web content accessibility is also required to attract people with disabilities and difficulties in reading to businesses as they feel comfortable using those websites. Consider a food ordering website or e-commerce website that doesn’t have accessible features would lose many customers as they won’t be comfortable in using those websites. Websites that are not accessible would push away customers and visitors instead of attracting them. The best way to make sure your website is accessible and you get maximum advantage from your website is to implement accessibility in web development abiding by Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
WCAG has four main principles for accessibility of web development that ensure websites are designed and developed to be accessible to people with disabilities. Here are some of the commonly recognized web accessibility standards:
The user should be able to perceive the information conveyed in the content. Perceivable doesn’t only mean that user can see the content with one’s eyes, users who are blind can’t read the information on a website so there needs to be an alternative for such users so that they can consume the content too, one way to ensure this is to make sure that the content is compatible with screen reader software and the language used in it is easily understood to the screen reader software.
Operable website means that the website is easy to operate, the users should be able to access and operate every part of the website like navigation, video, audio, buttons, forms etc. To make a website operable, it is highly recommended to use symbols and text that are relevant to the end user based on their nationality and industry. Also, websites should not be too complex, they should be simple and satisfy the purposes of the business and end user, many have ditched any excess functionality that could confuse users with disabilities and limitations.
The whole purpose of building a website is to make it understandable for the users so that they can utilize it for their purposes. Making a website understandable involves using language that is simple to understand, do not use complex English words and jargon that many users may not understand, the flow of the content should not be jumbled so that the information flow is in a step-by-step manner, the pages should be organized intuitively; and navigation on the website should be available for most of the pages if not all.
Robustness, as defined by WCAG, refers specifically to web content that is compatible with a variety of user agents like browsers, assistive technologies and other means of accessing web content. People with disabilities should be able to view and interact with your website through various browsers like Safari, Chrome, Firefox, IE etc.
Once our website has been developed using accessibility standards or we want to update our websites as per accessibility standards, we can use various tools and techniques to make sure that we don’t miss out on any points. To check website for accessibility we can use following methods:
There are a number of different web accessibility checkers available on the internet to check web accessibility compliance, also they are easy to use. Suppose you need to check your website for accessibility you can do so by entering your website URL in online checker, then choose the legislation by which you need to audit your website as different countries follow different legislations, once done you will get a detailed audit report including elaborate explanations and recommended solutions.
There are various extensions that are readily available and easily installed in the browser and can be used to check your website's accessibility. These extensions work for multiple browsers and are lightweight, simple and don’t require advanced accessibility knowledge. Browser extensions are ideal for individual developers and testers to find and fix common accessibility issues that exist on websites and gives the report regarding the same.
If you have thorough knowledge of accessibility, then you could also check the website’s accessibility manually. A checklist can be maintained and each point in the checklist can be manually verified as per defined parameters and standards depending upon the legislation of the country.
Allowing users with disabilities to run through your application and test it from start to end is a great way to ensure and certify that your application is practically suitable for use by people with disabilities. This also helps in practically identifying any gaps/issues in web application that can fixed to ensure the final product is solid.
Apart from extensions and online tools there are a number of web applications and software's developed that offer web accessibility services widely used to make websites accessible and improve the accessibility of websites. Here we will see few of the widely used tools for generating accessible websites:
With Dynomapper, you can create interactive sitemaps that provide an overview of your website's structure, content, and functionality. You can also use it to analyze your website's content and identify areas that need improvement.
Additionally, you can export your sitemaps and inventory reports in various formats, including CSV, Excel, and XML.
WAVE is a free web accessibility evaluation tool developed by WebAIM, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving web accessibility for people with disabilities that allows website owners and developers to test their web pages for accessibility issues and to identify areas where improvements can be made.
Cynthia Says is a web-based accessibility testing tool that helps in the process of implementing web accessibility for developers by identifying accessibility issues on their websites. It evaluates web pages against the WCAG and provides a detailed report of accessibility issues
SortSite scans web pages for a wide range of accessibility issues, including issues related to color contrast, text alternatives for images, keyboard navigation, and more. It provides a detailed report that highlights accessibility issues and provides suggestions for fixing them.
The Accessibility Checker analyzes the content entered in the CKEditor against accessibility guidelines and identifies issues that may prevent people with disabilities from accessing the content.
JAWS (Job Access With Speech) is a popular web accessibility tool that helps blind and visually impaired people navigate and interact with websites. It is a screen reader software developed by Freedom Scientific, a company that specializes in assistive technology. JAWS supports a range of web technologies, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications)
It is a cloud-based tool that can scan entire websites for accessibility issues and provide a detailed report on the issues detected. Tenon uses a combination of automated and manual testing to evaluate the accessibility of web pages. Tenon also includes a range of features designed to make it easier to integrate accessibility testing into a web development workflow.
Axe is a popular web accessibility testing tool that is used to identify and address accessibility issues on websites and web applications. It provides detailed reports on accessibility violations, warnings, and suggestions for improvement, making it easy for developers and testers to identify and fix issues. Axe uses a combination of rules and heuristics to scan web pages and identify accessibility issues.
We now have a fair understanding about web accessibility and its tools, you might also need to know some references of website that you can set as an example to implement accessibility on your website. Below is the list of best accessible websites that satisfy the web accessibility standards that you can refer to for your projects:
What’s better as a reference than the organization that sets and defines the standards for web accessibility for the world on internet. You will get to see every aspect of web accessibility in W3C website right from the right color contrast to structure HTM Tags, simple language, focus indicator to highlight the currently selected section of the page etc.
The Cram Foundation supports people with disabilities, so it becomes necessary for them to have their website accessible for people with disabilities and follow WCAG standards and guidelines. The Cram Foundation website has good color contrast, pleasing, attractive yet simple and accessible web design, its navigation is simple to understand and accessible in terms of color and structure.
The US Center for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention is a government website, so it is mandatory for them to be accessible. This website has navigation that is simple to understand, and visitors can navigate to the relevant section with ease. The website also has support for video and audio content in case the visitors are not fluent with English language or has some problem reading the content then they can take the advantage of audio and video contents.
Healthmonix is cloud-based technology payment solution for the medical and healthcare industry. Its website has an impressive adherence to web accessibility. It has relevant and subtle colors with clear color contrast, text is readable, and has structured and intuitive navigation throughout the website.
Unilever is among the world’s largest FMCG brands that operates world-wide and has a huge customer base of over 2 billion people. For this reason, it is committed to ensure that their website is accessible to all, and they exceed the standards set by WCAG for accessibility, Additionally, they have assistive technologies like text-to-speech, screen magnifier integrated to their website along with audio and video content.
The Financial Gym is a personal finance coaching service that has a good accessible website too. The website has an intuitive layout and navigation that is easy enough to navigate through keyboard or a screen reader. Also, the user is in control of the media, like videos on the website, as they do not autoplay.
Creating an accessible website involves designing and developing a site in a way that allows people with disabilities to access its content and functionality. Here are some general guidelines to follow to understand what makes a website accessible:
Although designing an accessible website is not legally required and there are no legal repercussions if websites are not accessible, it is wise to make your website accessible as per WCAG guidelines. Since you now know what website accessibility and its importance is, you can now work on designing your website as per accessibility standards. This will create a positive impression of your business for the users, and their experience of using your website will be good.
We have also gone through various tools that provide website accessibility services
that you can use to make your website accessible for your visitors and touch upon how you can make your website accessible along with some more accessible website examples for your reference. Be sure to consider these points next time you work on designing and developing your website. If you are looking for web development courses, then you can go for KnowledgeHut best Web Development courses to boost your career in website development.
Web accessibility improves the user experience, better search engine optimization, increases its reach to the end users and becomes inclusive for people with disabilities.
There are many software options for web design, and the best one for you will depend on your individual needs and preferences. Some of the best software's for web design are Sketch, Figma, Canva, Adobe Creative Cloud etc.
Web accessibility testing is the process of evaluating a website or web application to determine whether it is accessible to people with disabilities. The goal of accessibility testing is to ensure that people with disabilities can use and access digital content in the same way as people without disabilities.
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