May 16, 2019 is the eighth Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). If you post stuff on the web, I’d like to bring your attention to accessibility.
Some Terms:
Assistive Technology: Literally, technology to assist people with different disabilities. People with low vision use screen magnifiers, people with vision impairment use screen readers or refreshable braille displays. People with hearing impairments depend on closed captions in videos with audio. People with motor impairments may not be able to use a mouse or sometimes even a keyboard. There is one other class of disability with the label cognitive disabilities. Assistive tech for this group includes things like fonts specialized for dyslexia, and uber-clear writing and placement in form labels, plus the use of plain language all throughout the site.
Accessibility: In this usage of the word, we refer to the ability of web users with all sorts of disabilities to access content on the web. Access to content on the web can be blocked or limited for assistive technologies depending on many factors.
WCAG or Section 508: These terms are used with the phrase “compliance with,” since Section 508 is actually a part of the Americans With Disabilities Act, and WCAG is a set of guidelines published by the Web Accessibility Initiative to help content producers and developers to code better stuff for the web.
It’s All About Awareness
GAAD is an awareness day. What content managers don’t know can impair accessibility. Here is a pretend scenario: Content manager receives a signed document on paper and is instructed to ‘post this on the website.’ They use the multifunction printer to scan the paper to a PDF and email it. They post to the file manager in the CMS without checking the file. Bork! The file turned out to be an image of the text with no machine-recognizable words in it. This means people using screen readers have no access to that content because it cannot be read aloud by a machine. This is to say it’s inaccessible content.
If the content manager knew that text scanned in as an image could pose a problem for some of their audience, they could scan the document using different settings so that it could be machine searchable, and, even better, to have tags for accessibility added to the PDF and alt text added to any images in the document.
Another scenario: Web manager wants infographics all over the website to make data-heavy information more visually interesting. Web coder uploads three text-heavy images without any alternative text (alt text). Bork! Now all that ‘info’ in the infographic is inaccessible to users of screen readers.
In the scholarly articles about accessibility I have read, an industry’s failure to provide accessible content boils down to ignorance on the part of the developers and content managers. There isn’t much incentivizing going on to help people want to learn how to comply with accessibility guidelines other than the negative incentive of a potential lawsuit for failure to comply. And that is the use-case I see reported most often: a disabled customer brings a lawsuit against a government entity for failure to provide content in an accessible format.
What You Can Do
I have been using the hashtag #OhMyGAAD on LinkedIn to publicize the Global Accessibility Awareness Day. People are also using #OhMyGAAD on Twitter. I’ve signed the GAAD accessibility pledge and I earned the Site Improve certificates last year when I started using Site Improve. Before that, I had been coding federal government content to comply with Section 508 since 2011, and I also wrote a term paper on website accessibility in 2016.
Look up the hashtag on your favorite social media. Do three accessibility fixes on your own web content. When I think of accessibility, I remember that I am human, and I may not always be fully-abled as I am now. All the steps I’ve taken so far to publish accessible content are things I’d want any developer or content manager to do for me if I needed assistive technology.