Accessibility means web accessibility in this post. What is it? Let me start by a brief motivation: why should you care? First, for human reasons most importantly. From WCAG: “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 covers a wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible. Following these guidelines will make content more accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including accommodations for blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity, and combinations of these, and some accommodation for learning disabilities and cognitive limitations; but will not address every user need for people with these disabilities”. Second, it improves user experience (UX) for all. And third, there are regulatory reasons for this too: in EU there is the Web accessibility directive and in US there is a similar law called ADA. However, the laws currently don’t affect most of the private companies, but it might change in near future.
So what is it? Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 improves especially technical accessibility in internet. It has “12-13 guidelines that are organized under 4 principles: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. For each guideline, there are testable success criteria, which are at three levels: A, AA, and AAA.” Usually the target level is AA that also includes level A (AAA remarking full accessibility)! There is a summary which gives you a quick glance to it, which helps you get the “big picture”: https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/glance/. There is also a checklist which help you with how to meet the WCAG requirements. There also tools which you can use to evaluate your web content accessibility. It might be worth noting that there are many consultancy companies which sell accessibility audit/workshops. Some examples of technical tools for evaluation:
- Achecker tool checks single HTML pages for conformance with accessibility standards to ensure the content can be accessed by everyone. See the Handbook link to the upper right for more about the Web Accessibility Checker.
- WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool: WAVE is a suite of evaluation tools that helps authors make their web content more accessible to individuals with disabilities. WAVE can identify many accessibility and Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) errors, but also facilitates human evaluation of web content.
- Constrastschecker for checking accessible colour contrasts
You also need to have a public, regularly updated, accessibility statement on your website: see the template “ACCESSIBILITY STATEMENT“. In Finland, you can use a builder to create it for you. In short, the statement should include:
- What parts of your web site are not accessible, and reasons why: is it work in progress, not under regulation/law, or an unreasonable burden for some (what) reason
- Feedback mechanisms for users to report inaccessible content
- Possibility to access your relevant information in accessible format
- A link to the enforcement procedure
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