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Web accessibility is a practice of building websites accessible for all people. It means, everyone should access and understand a website in the same way. Accessible web will be achieved by following the standards and best practices of website design. An organisation working on the web content accessibility guidelines is Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). If a website does not follow the standards, it might not be understandable for people with disabilities.

Accessibility needs

In general we may divide disabilities into 2 categories: technical and physical.

Technical issues

• Browser - browsers may read HTML and CSS differently (especially if it has not been written according to W3C standards)
• Connection speed - visitors should access the web with any connection speed
• Scripts - the website has to remain usable, if scripts (like JavaScript) are disabled
• Mobile devices - a website should have a version for mobile devices, that don’t support the same screen resolutions and standards like desktops do. This issue should be taken into consideration very seriously as the mobile segment is growing fast.

Users with disabilities

• Blind users - the screen reader should understand the webpage, so it would be able to read the content of the web
• Deaf users - for any multimedia materials with audio, the explanations should be given
• Color blindness - the color combinations on the page should not mislead color-blind visitors
• Mobility problems - as some users are not able to use the mouse, the website has to be navigatable without a mouse
• Learning disabilities - users with learning disabilities may find confusing working on certain types of information.

According to these needs, special software has been developed: for blind users, talking browsers read the content of the web. Some websites offer a low vision version of the content and the controls to change the size and colors of the text. It’s important to allow to disable the images and banners and to change the layout of the page. Additionaly, services have been created that allow people with disabilities to use the web via proxy servers (Richards, J. T. et al, 2004). The idea is to provide a software that automatically modifyes the webpage according to the visitor’s needs and disabilities.

SEO creates accessible web

The goal of accessibility is to make web accessible to as many people as possible, despite of their technical, physical or other restrictions. Now, lets think a search engine as a visitor of a site: a search engine can not anyhow “see” the images and “listen” to the audio files on websites. A search engine couldn’t understand the content of the website, if it hasn’t been made accessible. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a term for making search-engine-friendly websites. In other words, it helps us to understand the need for accessible websites. If a webpage is search-engine-friendly, it means it could be also much easily understood by people with disabilities.

Every website should follow some basic SEO principles:

• understandable text links should be used (if you want to link to a page about semantic web, don’t name the link “click here”, but name it “semantic web”)
• tags should indicate the characteristics of a document (type, language etc)
• website should be usable when scripts (like JavaScript) are disabled
• text should be written in clearest and simplest language
• sitemaps and static links to every page
• accurate alt tags etc

Implementing SEO takes us one step closer to accessible web.

Accessibility and usability

The web usability guru Jakob Nielsen states that accessibility is not enough. I agree. Yes, we may build websites that are designed according to all WAI standards, but when the usability of the site is poor, visitors will be still misleaded and they will not start using the website. If a website is designed, both the accessibility and usability factors should be considered.

“When you want to improve your website for users with disabilities, remember the real goal: to help them better use the site” (Nielsen, 2005).

The future

All the fancy applications and web 2.0 services require the second version of the web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG 2.0). Web 2.0 keywords like AJAX and “user generated content” kill the accessible web. A lot of AJAX applications have been built that are not understandable for screen readers and not usable for keyboard-only users. Yes, they look nice, but if the JavaScript has been disabled or the user won’t understand the content, the website will be useless. A simplified and accessible solutions should be available as alternatives.

The problem with user generated content is that the users who provide all the content won’t add alternative text for images and videos so the materials could be accessible for disabled visitors. As these sites usually generate huge numbers of visitors, the site itself can’t guarantee accessible content everywhere.

In order to keep the new web accessible, the guidelines need to be improved.

Accessible websites?

Now, take the accessibility validator and try to find a website that does not generate errors. Even Google.com will generate one accessibility error.

References

Dolson, J. “What is Web Accessibility?”

Hagans, A. (2005) “High Accessibility Is Effective Search Engine Optimization”

Moss, T. (2007) “The future of web accessibility”

Nielsen, J. (2005) “Accessibility is not enough”

Richards, J. T., Hanson, V. L. (2004) “Web Accessibility: A Broader View“