What is Web Accessibility?

We need to understand that Web Accessibility is about allowing all users to interact with, engage with, and navigate through a web page. This means that no matter what, every person must be able to use any page without facing obstacles.

Who benefits from Web Accessibility?

"An estimated 1.3 billion people experience significant disability. This represents 16% of the world’s population, or 1 in 6 of us." - World Health Organization.

As the WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) mentions, accessibility will always benefit people with auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical, speech, and/or visual disabilities as well as people without disabilities.

We refer to people without disabilities as users having a temporary disability, such as having a broken arm or even losing their glasses. In this group, we also have situational limitations like your phone's volume not working or being somewhere too loud where you are not able to listen to any content on a page you are visiting. We need to consider the elderly population here as well, whose abilities change as a consequence of aging. Additionally, people using smartphones, smart watches, smart TVs, and small-screen devices will always benefit from Web Accessibility.

Now, after considering which users we are leaving behind if we don't make the web accessible we can go through the impact it may have for an organization.

How does web accessibility impact an organization?

An organization will always benefit from implementing accessibility in their websites or platforms. There are four important aspects in which accessibility plays an important role for a company:

Market Expansion

Sometimes, when a company tries to grow and reach a broader audience, they do not realize a large number of potential customers are being left behind or even ignored because they are being excluded through barriers and limited access to a site. This could change by having an accessible website that will help you approach all possible users or clients. By reaching a larger group of people, you will have more opportunities in the market considering that a specific segment was at some point overlooked. Also, your organization or brand will have an advantage compared to your competitors since you will offer an innovative, inclusive, and friendly user experience, resulting in greater customer satisfaction.

Social Responsibility

Nowadays, most information, entertainment, education, health care, news, and government services are accessed through the web. In order to ensure equal access and opportunities to an organization's community, including their employees, customers, suppliers, partners, and any audience that may use their websites, a company must get rid of any barrier that may exist to guarantee equality and inclusiveness.

Minimize Legal Risk

All around the world, considering how important in our daily lives technology, websites, platforms, and applications have become, governments and associations have established policies and legal requirements to encourage, defend and enforce the rights of people with disabilities. These laws state that websites must be accessible to people with disabilities, and some others request that web pages comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

The legal risk has increased over time, considering that many countries have specific policies and laws that evaluate whether a page is accessible, which means that it does not discriminate against any user with disabilities under any circumstance. For example, some are:

• The ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) in the US protects the rights of people with disabilities. To help us comply with web accessibility it offers us guidance and information to avoid having problems with their regulations.
• The EAA (European Accessibility Act) in the European Union mentions their main goal is to improve the functioning of the internal market for accessible products and services, by removing barriers created by divergent rules in Member States.

Not complying with these legal statements may result in lawsuits and/or fines if a company's website does not comply with accessibility or any of the legal requirements related to equal access. To avoid a legal problem, we should realize the importance of this aspect and be encouraged to make the web accessible as a good practice in our projects.

Now that you are aware of some of the legal consequences a company can face, we can talk about the tools that can help us make the web-accessible. There are plenty of evaluation tools the WAI recommends for us to use to determine if a website complies with accessibility guidelines. We should never skip audits since they will always help achieve improvement; for this, we can use Lighthouse or for a much more detailed audit we can make use of Allyant. Any of these tools will help test and check if our site complies with accessibility.

Enhancing SEO

Complying with accessibility guidelines is crucial for accomplishing and enhancing some SEO (Search Engine Optimization) best practices. Both web accessibility and SEO consider user experience and require us to improve it to boost our sites. Following and addressing some web accessibility requirements, such as title tags in the right order, audio and video transcripts with clear subtitles, image captions, and alt texts, will help pages comply with web accessibility guidelines. Consequently, we provide a better user experience, increasing our engagement.

Conclusions:

To sum up, being aware of how important web accessibility is will lead us to recognize that making the web accessible goes beyond following guidelines and rules and that it makes such a great impact in an organization as well as contributing to society by treating everyone with equity and by giving all users the same opportunity to access and engage with a website. At Stack Builders, we pride ourselves on our expertise in addressing accessibility issues and helping companies achieve ADA/EEA compliance. With our guidance, you can ensure that your organization is fully accessible to everyone and meets all relevant guidelines and regulations.