Web for All

I attended a conference couple of days back where one of the speaker who was specially abled gave a talk on Web Accessibility. It helped me realise my ignorance towards accessibility and how important it is to make web more inclusive with and for people with disabilities. We don’t need to do things out of the box to make accessible applications. We as developers can make accessible apps just by doing things right.

Let’s see the stakeholders who have a direct impact on accessibility.

Content Managers

Teams producing content for the web represent a really critical link in maintaining the accessibility of an app. It’s important they optimise the content for people with impairments so users are able to precisely understand the usage . Also, they need to understand HTML semantics and add the right tags while adding content through content management system.

User Experience designers & Developers

They are the people who need to drive accessibility within the organisation. They need to ensure people take it seriously and products are shipped in accordance to web content accessibility guidelines. They should provide support to all other areas by educating teams on how best to improve their part of the product to create better experiences for users.

Designers set the base for accessibility and developers build same experiences for all on top of it. Designers need to ensure colors have enough contrast so that users with visual disabilities can read your content. You will want to achieve at least AA conformance( at least 4.53: 1 contrast ratio) on your pages. AAA performance is ideal, but it can be difficult to use a robust color palette and achieve AAA conformance.

Web by default is accessible and we as developers can ensure major percentage of accessibility compliance in our apps just by using right semantics. In order to create fancy UI’s we tend to forget the semantics and start mixing up HTML tags resulting in applications that can be used only by certain sections of people. Equally important is the heading structure within the app. Heading levels should follow hierarchal order in order to ensure accessibility tree is in correct order.

Additionally, we need to set up a process where features go through QA so we have basic accessibility checks in place before something is shipped into production. Testers should know how to spot basic accessibility issues. Not to the level that an accessibility expert could, but they should be able to test for obvious issues like keyboard accessibility, text alternatives, and basic colour contrast — even if they don’t necessarily know how to resolve these issues.

Conclusion

Teams should understand user’s diversity and accessibility should always be their priority. Accessibility is everyone’s responsibility and need to be embedded as best practice in an organisation.