What Makes a Website Accessible?
Simply put, it means that your public-facing content can be used by anyone who lands on your site. That is good business sense, is it not? You want all your customers to be able to:
Interact. When someone lands on your site, you want that person to navigate and explore, download the app, fill out the form, click to buy the T-shirt, call the number, tap to pay the bill.
Consume. You want users to enjoy the video, the podcast, the blog, the app.
If you didn’t want all users to interact with and consume your content, you wouldn’t have a website at all.
What’s the Problem?
Sensible as it may sound to make your website accessible to all, our partner accessiBe reveals the current state of things: “For the billions of people who live with a disability, the internet can feel like a series of closed doors.”
Why is that? Because the people who created 98% of websites did not consider the needs of the estimated 20% of the population with disabilities.
When you do stop to consider the challenge of designing a truly accessible website can quickly seem overwhelming. After all, how does a user navigate your website without using their eyes? Or appreciate your podcast with deaf ears? Or press the Buy Now button with limited motor function?
What’s the Solution?
No one is asking your company to solve all these problems with your website. Assistive technologies like screen readers, Braille displays, and alternative input devices enable web access by presenting website content in a way the user can consume and interact with it.
How does it work?
To understand that requires a few basics of web development.
- Each webpage is really a collection of text documents written in code (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.).
- In HTML, each element of the page is wrapped in a tag. For example, <h1> is the tag for Heading 1. <p> is for paragraph. <img> is an image.
- Software, such as your web browser, interprets the code as instructions to present the content.
When you rely on visual indicators to understand content, your eyes might be drawn to large text near the top. In other words, the size and placement of that text work together to instruct you: "Read this first."
For an assistive device, which can’t necessarily rely on visual cues, that <h1> may be the only indicator to "read this first." In other words, wrapping the page heading in that <h1> makes it easier for assistive devices to present your content in the intended order.
Why Does i7MEDIA Make Accessible Websites?
It’s the right thing to do. Call it compassion for people facing physical and mental limitations. Call it respect for their indomitable spirit. Call it appreciation for the caregivers, support organizations, and even standards commissions who serve such important functions. Call it patriotism or obeying the law. It’s just plain right.
Good code tells a story. That’s a phrase you sometimes hear from our developers. What they mean is that the variables, functions, markup, styles, etc., should do more than just work. They should be organized and named in a discernible fashion. One developer should be able to read another’s code and understand the purpose of each part. By writing accessibility-minded code, a developer ends up writing semantic, consistent, standards-compliant code that tells a story. When it comes right down to it, good code is good code.