Accessibility: How it affects us all and how we can help improve it

Alan Colyer

6 min read .

What is Accessibility?

Accessibility, or a11y as it is known to developers like myself, is a blanket term describing the practice of ensuring that a website is usable and understandable by a broad audience including, but not limited to, people with disabilities.

Accessibility allows all users, regardless of their abilities or disabilities to perceive, understand, navigate and interact with content.

It is not just for people with visual impairments; it also includes hearing impairments, motor disabilities, cognitive impairments or any other conditions that requires the need for support or assistive technologies to improve their user experience.

Accessibility is not just limited to website design. There can also be issues with a logo, brand colours, typography, iconography or any other brand asset that isn’t designed to be accessible to a diverse audience with individual needs.

Often it is unfortunately overlooked as unless personally affected by disability, an organisation wouldn’t necessarily encounter or have knowledge of issues that would stop your website from being accessible.

Why does it matter?

According to latest estimates from the Department for Work and Pensions’ Family Resources Survey [1], 16 million people in the UK had a disability in the 2021/22 financial year. This number is trending upwards year on year.

16 million people in the UK had a disability in the 2021/22 financial year. This number is trending upwards year on year.

This represents an overall 24% of the population, but notably this isn’t constant over all age groups – 11% of children, 23% of working age, and 45% of state pension age have a recognised disability [2].

So depending on your audience, up to as much as 45% of your users could be affected by disability and not experiencing your website in the way it was intended. This can result in a poor experience with your brand and/or even lead to a loss in potential sales. From a human point of view, it’s just inconsiderate.

If they aren’t disabled, why does accessibility matter?

It’s true that not all of these disabilities would prevent someone using a website or require assistive technologies to do so. However, if you consider what accessibility and ability really mean for a minute, it’s likely you can think of someone you know who has difficulties with using computers or the internet – maybe yourself, or an older relative – who isn’t otherwise less abled.

For example you might know someone who gets frustrated trying to click buttons that are too small because for them, using a mouse is fiddly. Or maybe someone who feels overwhelmed with lots of movement on a page because the videos auto play or have fast cuts in them. They might not have a disability (or at least not a diagnosis for one) but the accessibility of the website they are trying to use still affects them and can cause frustration, potentially leading them to leave the website.

They might not have a disability (or at least not a diagnosis for one) but the accessibility of the website they are trying to use still affects them and can cause frustration, potentially leading them to leave the website.

This only underlines the importance of ensuring your website does not pose barriers to users by failing to consider different ability levels, regardless of whether those ability levels are currently recognised as disabilities or not.

Photo by Vlada Karpovich

Ensuring accessibility & how far do we go?

This is where the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) come into play.

WCAG are a set of guidelines for developers which allow us to ensure a website is as accessible to the most amount of people as it can be.

There are several levels of accessibility, A, AA and AAA. 

Typically we aim for as close to AA level as practical for most builds as best practice.

This means small things most probably wouldn’t normally notice like:

  • ensuring you can use a keyboard to navigate your website easily
  • ensuring images have descriptive text incase someone cannot view them clearly, or signal they are not important to the content so screenreaders can skip them
  • Adding “skip links” so that when a screenreader is in used, users can quickly skip the visual elements of the page to get right to the content rather than listening to the screenreader list every link and image in the header
  • Ensuring the colours in the design have enough contrast
  • Ensuring text size doesn’t get too small
  • Ensuring buttons are big enough to always clickable / tappable on a touch screen
  • Ensuring flashy animations that use a lot of movement are skipped or toned down, or videos don’t autoplay when a user’s browser is set to prefer reduced motion

Taking it further, we can also focus on this aspect of a project to fully meet the AA or even AAA level standards where this is a requirement and more time can be allotted to accessibility, such as public sector projects where in most cases this is a legal requirement.

Achieving certification for these standards require more time and attention paid to them to ensure a project can meet them when complete, and ensure maximum accessibility.

While AA or AAA level isn’t always technically required in a project, Accessibility is always worth due consideration to ensure your site will be ranked higher and provide a useful and positive experience for the most people possible.

Here at Strut, we have in-depth experience in all levels of WCAG and also public sector and government websites which often require AAA compliance. We are always up for a new and interesting project. Drop us a line to discuss how we can meet your project’s accessibility requirements.

Sources

[1] UK disability statistics: Prevalence and life experiences, House of Commons Library
[2] Family Resources Survey: financial year 2021 to 2022, Gov.uk