What to Know About Website Accessibility

Medically Reviewed by Jabeen Begum, MD on July 22, 2024
Written by Amber Felton
4 min read

Website accessibility is still a relatively new concept, and many people aren't sure why it matters. Many associate website accessibility with disabled individuals, like those who lack fine motor skills or are visually impaired. But website accessibility is something that benefits all people. 

There are several reasons website accessibility is a must. It helps with usability even for nondisabled individuals and promotes inclusivity for all internet users. Plus, it’s the law. While website accessibility may seem intimidating to achieve, the end result will help everyone use the internet with ease, especially people with disabilities. 

Website accessibility must be addressed head-on. This means it's important to educate yourself on what website accessibility is and how to make websites accessible. 

So, what is website accessibility?

Website accessibility is when a website is created to be accessible to all persons, regardless of their abilities or disabilities, conditions, or circumstances. While there are laws about website accessibility, many websites and tools don’t abide by the law and still have barriers that make it challenging for disabled individuals to use them. 

When a website is created to be accessible, people can: 

  • Navigate and interact with the website
  • Understand the content on the website
  • Play a part in contributing to the website

Website accessibility also allows all disabled individuals to use the web, including those experiencing auditory issues, cognitive issues, neurological issues, physical issues, speech impairments, and visual decline. 

Website accessibility isn’t just for the disabled. It can benefit people without disabilities too. For example, it benefits people using smaller screens, people experiencing temporary disabilities like a broken arm, people who have limited bandwidth, and people in certain environments that make it harder to see things on a screen, like exposure to bright sunlight. 

The Importance of Website Accessibility

We’re living in a technological world where technology is continuing to evolve rapidly. We were nowhere near where we are now 30 years ago, and 30 years in the future, we’ll be able to say the same thing. Due to the evolution of technology, the web has become an essential part of various aspects of life, including employment, health care, education, and commerce. Even the government relies heavily on the web nowadays. 

The web gives us the opportunity to get unparalleled access to information worldwide. Access to this information, and the web itself, is now considered a basic human right. 

It also makes sense from a business and financial perspective. After all, the more accessible a website is, the wider of an audience will be able to use it and turn into potential users and customers. 

Making websites accessible benefits everyone, from individuals to businesses and even society as a whole.

There are a global set of guidelines geared toward accessibility called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG. These guidelines stipulate the recommendations for making a website accessible. WCAG has four primary principles that it follows, making sites: 

  • Perceivable
  • Operable
  • Understandable
  • Robust 

All of the following content should follow these principles: 

  • HTML pages
  • PDF and Word documents
  • Audio and video 
  • Games
  • Maps

Accessibility Best Practices

If you’re creating web content, then it’s important to adhere to these best practices to ensure your website is accessible and inclusive to all: 

  • You shouldn't rely on color when it comes to navigation. People with low vision, blindness, or even color blindness will not benefit from heavy usage of color to convey messages or differentiate between objects. 
  • Make sure that all images on websites include alt text in the markup. Images that display complex situations and scenarios should have more comprehensive descriptions like a caption or summary built into a nearby paragraph. 
  • Mouse and keyboard functionality should work as normal, but there should also be a way to work with voice control. Additionally, these systems should be tied together to work well with each other. 
  • If podcasts are involved, you should provide transcripts for the hard of hearing. 
  • Videos displayed on your website should have in-sync captioning that viewers can read if they can't hear the audio. 
  • Engage in 508 testing to ensure that your site follows accessibility compliance.

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has strict regulations on discrimination against individuals with disabilities. In fact, all services, programs, and activities of states and local governments must ensure their information is accessible and inclusive to all. 

The ADA requires that all state and local governments provide effective communication with all persons, regardless of their disabilities. Since many state and government programs are being offered online, these programs must be accessible to disabled people. 

These programs include: 

  • Obtaining an absentee ballot
  • Filing police reports 
  • Attending virtual meetings 
  • Filing and processing tax documents 
  • Applying for state benefits and disability programs 
  • Registering for school programs

To understand the true benefits of website accessibility, here are some examples of barriers and how to fix them. 

  • Contrast: Poor color contrast can make using the web challenging for people with low vision and color blindness. It makes it difficult for them to read text, especially if the text is a similar color to the background. For example, poor color contrast would look like light blue text on a cream-colored background. To combat this issue, you should use contrasting colors. For example, dark blue and yellow are two colors that contrast well enough and would work for accessibility purposes. 
  • Online forms: Online forms that lack labels for important fields like credit card number or email address can exclude individuals who have disabilities that don’t allow them to see well. When there are labels on forms, screen readers can pick up the text and read it aloud to disabled people, letting them know exactly where to put their information. 
  • Navigation: Many web pages require the use of a mouse or trackpad to navigate from page to page, or even up and down the page. But this excludes people with motor function disabilities from being able to use these websites. Instead, allow the use of a keyboard to navigate your website.