Are you selling something online with your new website? When I talk to new website owners, they are sometimes surprised to find out about web accessibility.
Web accessibility, also known as digital accessibility, refers to designing and developing websites in a way that allows people with disabilities to perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the content effectively. It is important for your website because it ensures inclusivity and provides equal access to information and services for all users, regardless of their abilities.
Can my website be subject to legal action if it is not accessible?
Yes, your website can be subject to legal action if it is not accessible to individuals with disabilities. In many countries, including the United States, there are laws and regulations, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), that require websites to be accessible. Failure to comply with these laws can lead to lawsuits and legal consequences.
There have been numerous cases where companies faced legal action for web accessibility noncompliance. For instance, major companies like Target, Dominos, and Beyoncé’s Parkwood Entertainment have been sued for alleged website accessibility barriers, resulting in significant legal settlements or judgments.
I’m crafting this blog to help new website owners understand some of the important aspects to posting accessible content.
If a content management system already has a WYSIWYG editor like the CK editor, then you will see an ‘add table’ icon. For proper accessibility, you should choose a header row, or header column, or both, depending on your data.
If you are running a WordPress site, you’ll notice the absence of a table button. It’s not functionality you can get in an out-of-the-box installation of WordPress, but there are plugins available.
Year
Title
Department
2020
Social Distancing
Pandemic
2019
Crowded Concerts
Carefree Abandon
I used the TablePress plugin to build the above table.
This accessibility care package is a set of trainings and tools that can help with identifying what steps you can take to start creating accessible content from the beginning. Make your native file documents accessible from the start to get PDFs that are better for screen readers. Use checklists before publishing content to ensure your content accessibility.
I’m creating a presentation about accessibility that fills a gap I noticed in the current training patterns around digital accessibility. For the past five years, I would attend conference sessions, presentations, and online trainings about accessibility but very few presenters were showing the audience what it is like to experience content through assistive technologies. I’ve got a recorded interview lined up for my presentation so that my audience can hear screen readers announce content. As a followup to my presentation, I’m creating this accessibility care package for people new to accessibility.
Test your text color values for color contrast ratios. It gives you a simple pass or fail for different text sizes. This applies to printed documents, too.
Site Improve’s free toolkit. Site Improve offers a paid software, but they also have these free checker tools such as a Chrome extension and a color contrast checker.
Training
How to write alt text. There are ways and ways to approach alt text. I don’t have any definitive answers for this, except that you can make it brief. If an image is text heavy, it is better practice to re-describe it in the body copy, or use a screen reader only class to type out the content just for screen readers.
Site Improve’s Basics of Web Accessibility. I use this product at work because my agency pays for the license. They are an international company so this blog post includes technical standards from other countries.
Add Paragraph Styles: InDesign. When you set up your file with paragraph styles it makes it easier to map styles to tags for your export to PDF.
How to map a Style to a Tag in InDesign. It would be really great if your InDesign section headers and major content headers could have the tags H1, H2, H3. That way, when you export to PDF, the digital version will have semantic markup and the bookmarks should be automatic from document structure.
PDFs are not automatically accessible. You need to run a few tools in the full version of Acrobat to get full accessibility. Unfortunately, the free program Reader will not do these things.
By the way, I did write a term paper about accessibility while earning my bachelor’s degree in technical communication. See my portfolio accessibility page to read it.
On Valentine’s Day I visited the Colorado School for the Deaf and the Blind (CSDB) in Colorado Springs, CO. I was there to provide support for my State agency’s listening tour conducted by our State Personnel Director. I serve as an accessibility ambassador in my role of content administrator for many State websites, so I was pleased to be invited at the last minute. The school serves students from preschool to 21 years old.
The number one thing I learned by listening to school employees participating in the listening session is that the deaf and hard of hearing community is a culture unto itself. One woman spoke up to describe how hearing people think that deaf people are the same as hearing people except they just can’t hear. However, she explained, there is an entire deaf culture that we hearing people just don’t know about. And I agree. I don’t really know that culture at all. She mentioned to me that one thing web content producers should understand is that most people in the deaf community prefer an American Sign Language (ASL) translation over closed captions on videos. Oh, how many closed captions I’ve done over the years, and I’ve never known this!
The Campus Tour
Touring the campus, we saw dorm rooms for deaf and hard of hearing students equipped with visual doorbells. To knock on the door, you push the doorbell and it pulses the lights in the room on and off. We saw an outdoor running track designed for blind and visually impaired students that had a bright yellow handrail on both sides all the way around. And the tactile sculpture in the dorms was a big hit. Below, Kassi reaches out to touch the art work.
My favorite sculpture on CSDB campus was this tactile piece with finger signs and braille around three sides. In the photo with Kassi showing three children reaching for stars, the caption is “We touch the stars.” The side with trees and three children says “We shape our lives.”
Insights
Another big takeaway for me as a content administrator is how much of the internet is still inaccessible. My agency’s third-party job application site and our internal cybersecurity awareness trainings are not accessible. The issue with this is that it means someone who needs accessible content can not act independently. They must then depend on someone else to help them do the application or take the training.
Just think, the minute you need to use a mouse to click on content because it’s the only way to move forward is the minute that content becomes inaccessible to someone who needs a keyboard-only interface, such people who are blind / visually impaired or people with a motor disability.
One last thing
Meet the person responsible for your choices, words, actions, jobs, future, and success. Before you speak, THINK: Is it True? Is it Helpful? Is it Inspiring? Is it Necessary? Is it Kind?
This whiteboard message belongs everywhere, doesn’t it! And, let’s make the web accessible to help these young students achieve their success independently.
If you are a web content manager but aren’t comfortable with styling tables in HTML and CSS, then you need to use your CMS’s WYSIWYG editor to enter your data tables. Continue reading “Data Tables in Drupal”
This video tutorial is about tagging PDF files for accessibility. Tagging creates a document structure that allows for screen readers to read PDFs aloud in the correct order, and also to allow a mobile device to reflow and display the file on small viewports. Continue reading “How to tag a PDF for accessibility”
