Accessibility
This topic is dear to me because it has to do with inclusion in the use of technology.
Accessibility means providing content or having functionality that is fully available and usable, with the consideration of people with disabilities in mind — ensuring that there are no barriers for them to interact with or have access to the website on the world wide web.
It’s important to know that 15% of the world’s population experiences a form of disability — that’s about a billion people. In this episode, our emphasis will be on web accessibility. Web accessibility simply means building a website in a way that people with disabilities can use, with minimal or no help. One also has to keep in mind that building with accessibility in mind is invariably building a much better and usable product for everyone.
Picture this — talking to Siri to tell you what the weather for the day is, or watching a YouTube video and turning on the captions. These are examples of tools generally used by a lot of people, even though these were created with people with disabilities in mind. We find they are accessibility features that benefit everyone.
There are various types of disabilities — it’s a really wide spectrum.
Visual disability: This is not limited to blindness. It includes low vision, colour blindness, and poor eyesight in general.
Motor/mobility disability: This includes the inability to use one’s hands or muscles, muscle slowness, or loss of fine muscle control. Examples are seen in Parkinson’s disease or cerebral palsy or stroke.
Auditory disabilities: Deafness or a whole lot of hearing impairments.
Speech and cognitive disabilities: Developmental disabilities, learning difficulties like dyslexia, cognitive disabilities like PTSD.
Quite some people mix up accessibility and performance. While both are suited towards ensuring the user has a better website experience overall, there is a difference between both concepts. Performance has to do with ensuring a website or application is small and fast so that users with slower internet connections and devices can have a good experience. Accessibility however is focused on the experience of people with disabilities.
Why care about accessibility as a developer?
The initial state of the web was decently accessible, but with the emergence of new libraries and frameworks, there came more flexibility in the building of the web, and this also had a ripple effect on web accessibility. So we want to take the web back to the pure state of being accessible.
Another reason which sounds slightly selfish, but is true, is that like I mentioned earlier, about a billion people in the world have a form of disability or the other, and building with them in mind will definitely increase the reach of your product.
Thirdly, one must keep in mind that accessibility is a human right, and it must be protected and prioritized. You and I need to play a part in ensuring that that happens.
How do you know the degree of your website’s accessibility? What are the guiding principles?
First of all, it is important to listen to people with disabilities.
Also, having a diverse team can help with getting different perspectives on the accessibility of your website. User testing as much as possible is also important.
Secondly, there are best practices that also need to be followed. A body known as Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) has been widely accepted for the creation of websites. WCAG is recommended for making sites accessible primarily for people with disabilities. There are four main principles under which these guidelines are created:
The content should be perceivable, meaning it should be available to at least one of the five senses. For example, for people with visual impairments, the content should be large enough for them to see. For those who are blind, the content should be set up for screen readers to work with. For deaf people, the content should have text representation.
The content should be operable. For people with motor/mobility disabilities and are not able to use a mouse, a website should be set up in such a way that they can use keyboard-only or speech recognition software to access it. Also, ensuring that users have enough time to read and use your content is what being operable means. Ensuring that your website does not cause seizures or physical reactions. E.g. a note or a warning for users such that they are informed ahead of time if any flash content will be displayed. They should be able to switch off animations that can cause seizures or any kind of physical reaction.
The content needs to be understandable. This is particularly for people with learning and cognitive disabilities. You need to be able to use clear and simple language. Avoid the use of idioms, try not to overwhelm users with too much information.
Finally, your website should be robust. This means that it is set up so that it is compatible with assistive technologies like the screen reader.
There are three conformance levels within these guidelines. They are level A, level AA, and level AAA.
Level A refers to the must-rules required for a website to be considered as accessible.
Level AA — things you should do to be considered as an accessible website.
Level AAA — things you might do for your website to be considered as accessible.
People typically target the minimal level to be AA because that’s just like a fine balance between three levels. We also have different accessibility tools that you can use to check the status of your website (i.e. the accessibility of your application). Examples are Accessibility developer tools on Google Chrome, AXE, colour contrast analyzer, Wave evaluation tool, JAWS, and NVDA.
Keep in mind that using your product with accessibility in mind is building a better product for all users overall. I hope you learnt something today. I’ll talk to you in the next episode.
