Website Accessibility
Web Accessibility Standards
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.
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Accessibility Framework
We develop and build digital content that meets the WCAG 2.0 Accessibility standards (Level AA), so users who have one or more impairments from the list below will be able to view and access the content on the website.
- visual: degrees of impairment in one or both eyes, colour blindness, sensitivity to bright colours
- speech: difficulty producing speech for the purposes of speech recognition services or people
- auditory: hard of hearing, deafness
- cognitive and neurological: learning disabilities, distractibility, difficulties remembering, focusing on large amounts of information
- physical: difficulties using a mouse or keyboard, limited fine motor control, slower response time
Accessibility User Testing
We will initially develop all content to be fully compliant to WCAG 2.0 compliance and in the first iteration we will self-assess using our in house tools.
Once self assessment has been approved we will then test content with end users. These test users will include a minimum of 6 screen reader users of varying abilities who will be asked to complete several test tasks within the website.
These will be independently monitored by an expert on accessibility to ensure we have thorough independent advice on stage two user testing.
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