0
0
Web accessibility is a necessity, and it is here to stay. There are many reasons why more and more organizations commit to diversity, inclusion, and equality, along with the increase in accessibility compliance lawsuits. This is the biggest news for website owners, developers, and designers to be aware of and comply with within their efforts to build websites. Many legislations are also being instated by the governments which aim towards better internet access for everyone.
With this need in hand, people are confused about how, to begin with, web accessibility? If you are not aware of the standards of web accessibility and how to go forward with it, here we will discuss a few important aspects of the same.
AccessiBe – Making the web easy to use for all
Considering our daily lives, we can see that the advent of the internet and web technologies has changed things largely over the last couple of decades. Everything including news, commerce, information, education, and all sorts of day-to-day needs are very much available at our fingertips now. AccessiBe says that the digital resources now help improve engagement by facilitating quicker completion of tasks and improving usability endlessly. Now, everyone is on the lookout for ways to leverage the most out of the internet, and this has been easier than ever before.
However, when it comes to building user-friendly websites, there are still many flaws we can see in every application. There are millions of links, confusing link texts, inadequate navigation labels, non-compliant forms, and confusing captchas. Everything makes it frustrating and tiresome for even the normal users to access websites and accomplish their tasks through them. If so, what about people with disabilities like vision problems or hearing impairment. You can find that about 90% of the websites do not comply with the accessibility requirements in order to make those compliant with the special needs of the disabled. There are laws and standards to ensure accessibility compliance of websites, but these are not meaningfully followed.
Web accessibility as usability
The standards set for web accessibility will help the website and applications builders to create better technology for the users. With this requirement in hand, the technology companies are now more focused on designing the user interfaces which work for most users, including people with disabilities. Some of the common design flaws in accessibility and usability are as below.
- Building it by catering to the median users may tend to exclude the users at the edges of the common use cases.
- Design incompetency like the links of the same color and regular text, improper keyboard-only navigation, not following the alt tags for multimedia, avoiding the need for subtitles and captions for videos, etc., all can contribute to the accessibility flaws.
Fortunately, AccessiBe points out this is changing as more people are being aware and getting involved in ensuring web accessibility. The cornerstones of accessibility are based on the principles of permeability, operability, understandability, and robustness. We will discuss these fundamental needs in another article of this series.
