Your Guide to Web Accessibilty

Accessibility is the process of designing your website so that people who experience these disabilities can visit your website and find the same information as easily as someone who doesn't have a disability. 

A few important things to understand about web accessibility:

• Government, banking, and higher education institutes are required by law to ensure their web experiences are accessible.
• Accessible web design should be important for any company with a Web or mobile presence.
• Best practices include direct access for persons with disabilities and support for assistive technology (e.g. screen readers, magnifiers,  tactile keyboards). 
• This isn't a one time set up. It's something you have to monitor and adapt on an on-going basis as your website evolves and technology changes.  
• Some companies don't plan for accessibility because they believe it's costly in terms of design and development. 

Accessibility is a growing requirement, and it's not going to go away, so it's critical for every organization to understand what they can do to ensure their web experience supports web content accessibility guidelines.

"Doing a project to make something accessible is a good start. What it really takes to succeed with accessibility in the long run is making accessibility and inclusion part of the culture of an organization. If accessibility doesn't get built into everything, then an organization is likely to find themselves in exactly the same position down the road: all kinds of accessibility issues that could have been prevented. " Derek Featherstone, team leader at Simply Accessible  

In this guide, we provide a look at the industry standards and some of the basic web accessibility standards you can follow, as well as a few advanced capabilities.  

It can be overwhelming for an organization to tackle a full accessibility plan out of the gate.

Instead of getting overextended, focus on implementing bite-sized chunks of accessibility. Sometimes starting with smaller changes makes the move to accessibility easier.

Once you have some basics in place, continue to implement more capabilities as you improve the web experience. 

Here are a few basic web accessibility standards you should consider implementing in your first chunk of work. 

Keyboard Shortcuts

• Enable keyboard access to all web pages and elements on a web page
• Ensure the seamless movement between text and controls on the web page, using the Tab or UP/DOWN arrows on keyboard

Text Alternatives

• Include text for all controls and input fields (valid entry in the Name meta tag) 
• For all images, videos, audio include text description with the ALT tag 
• Offer text-based alternatives for audio and video, use captioning and/or sign-language with videos 
• Provide the ability to resize text on a web page
• Ensure all titles, headings and links are descriptive of the topic or purpose

Logical Heading Structures

• Use consistent navigation across web pages 
• Provide headings and subheadings to organize content and enable the skipping of content blocks (sections of content)

Forms

• Offer keyboard shortcut for all input fields and controls in a form.
• Provide clear labeling and support the ability to move from form elements
• When using CAPTCHA, provide alternative types of sensory perception

Misc

• Text is resizable
• Color is not used as the sole conveyor of identifying content or functionality
• Tables are used to present data, rows, and columns clearly

You've decided it's time your website was more accessible. But where do you start? 

We recommend you follow this simple three-step guide to implement and support an accessible website. 

1. Find out how your site scores now. 
2. Develop and implement a plan to address page-level and site-level errors. 
3. Adopt a strategy to stay ahead of requirements. 

Find out how your site scores now 

Sometimes you develop websites that are partially accessible by nature of your development standards. For example, your development standards may indicate that you always fill out the ALT tag on an image.  

If you already have a website, there are page-level tools you can use to test your website's compliance with standards including AChecker and Wave (powered by WebAIM). If you are building a new website, you can use these tools to check your pages as you create them. 

Develop and implement a plan to address page-level and site level errors 

If you are building new web pages and templates, run the accessibility validator as you develop the page, making the necessary changes to ensure it adheres to the accessibility guidelines you want to follow. 

If you are validating an existing website, consider validating and modifying in sections of web pages if your site is large. Validate each page, making a list of the changes to make, then implement the changes as part of an accessibility project outlining sections of the website to modify in each sprint. 

Accessibility changes are made by one of three people: a content author/editor, a designer or a developer. Ensure your plan identifies not only the change to make but the person who needs to make the change. Set up a review and approval process for each web page, and also for the complete project or sprint.  

Remember that it's unlikely you will make all the changes required to meet complete compliance in one sitting (unless you are a government agency or a higher education institute, in which case full compliance isn't an option). So even though you may have an extensive list of all guidelines to implement for each web page as you run it through the validator, you will likely select a certain set of guidelines to implement per project or sprint. This process will continue until you have implemented all the guidelines to meet full compliance. 

Adopt a strategy to stay ahead of requirements 

When you have an existing website that you want to make more accessible, you know you're going to apply the necessary changes in phases to make the transition happen smoothly, and likely faster. But once you have full compliance, that doesn't mean you are finished.  

On-going monitoring and maintenance are required to ensure that as your website evolves, it continues to support the accessibility guidelines you adopted. Here are a few suggestions to ensure your website and web content always meets your accessibility guidelines: 

• If you perform regular site audits, include an accessibility report in the audit.  
• At a minimum, adopt a bi-annual or annual accessibility audit. The number of web page your site has and the frequency at which you modify templates will indicate how often you need to do this audit. 
• Offer accessibility training to authors, designers, and developers, so they clearly understand what they need to do and why it's so important.  
• Include an Accessibility section on your Intranet that links your accessibility guidelines (whether you adopt an industry standard directly or create your own set of guidelines), outlines the content creation process and approval workflow for implementing accessibility guidelines and the development and design guidelines to implement. 
• Read regularly about accessibility to keep up to date on guidelines, new technologies you need to support and new technologies or tactics you can adopt.