Website Accessibility

Web content should be accessible to all users, including people with a disability, partial or full blindness, aged, and people who have limited experience with technology. Web development agencies are obligated under the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 to make all information and services available to all members of our community. The Victorian Government has built a framework around the requirements of its online services, including external content, to meet the WCAG 2.0 Accessibility Standard (Level AA).

Web accessibility standards are an important consideration when building a website. The internet has become a meaningful and pervasive resource for all many people around the globe. It has become a necessary tool to connect us to business, education, governance, health, recreation, and social inclusion. Unfortunately, not all web content is designed to overcome usability issues for people of varying abilities. Apart from being discriminatory, it’s also unfortunate for many businesses and services to miss out on traffic from the millions of internet users who have some form of special need or impairment. Developing your website to be all-inclusive will be beneficial for your brand identity, reach more people and prevent you from having to incorporate mandatory accessibility down the track at extra cost.

Agencies are expected to develop inclusive content that meets the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) accessibility guidelines for persons with a hearing disability, learning disabilities, physical impairment, speech difficulties, aging, and visual impairment.

WordPress is a good Content Management System (CMS) for building web accessibility standards into your website. At the start of your project, it is better to evaluate the accessibility standard as you build rather than test it later and make costly changes.

Some examples of W3C usability checks:

Alternative text for images

Provide text alternatives for any non-text content so that it can be changed into other forms people need, such as large print, braille, speech, symbols or simpler language. W3C

Text is referred to as actual text, not an image of text. A visually impaired person and people with low bandwidth would access the context of an image on a web page via the Alt text. Alt text needs to help with the understanding of the page content and convey the same meaning as the image. If an image is decorative or there to make the page more aesthetic then the image is not required for accessibility and should have null alt. When the image has a purpose, such as a picture of a resort for a holiday site then the alt text would describe the scene of the photo.

Keyboard functionality

Not everyone can use a mouse due to the loss of fine motor skills or disability, temporary or permanent. An accessible site will factor in keyboard functions in place of mouse navigation and speech-to-text assistive technology. This includes moving between pages, opening links, and accessing buttons and forms.

Audio Transcripts

People with hearing impairment need an alternative to audio on your website. Providing transcripts of all audio will increase accessibility to your content.

Page title

The page title needs to concisely and adequately describe the page content and not be too similar to other pages on your site.

Headings

Headings on a web page are used to define sections of content and help the eye navigate around the page. They need to be tiered to make sense: for example, heading 1 needs to be bolder and larger than heading 2, and so on. There should be at least one heading on each page. Each heading should conceptualise the section it is captioning.

If you would like some advice and help with upgrading your website to include the accessibility standards contact us today.