Webpage Accessibility

Accessibility for All

Variously, it is estimated that

  • 1 in 7 people has a disability of some kind
  • 1 in 4 people has some vision difficulty
  • 1 in 4 people has some dexterity difficulty
  • 1 in 5 people has some hearing difficulty
  • 1 in 5 people find using most websites difficult or impossible, because of a disability
  • 60% of adults, 18-64 years old, would benefit from accessibility technology added to every website (Forrester Research, 2003)

In speaking with people about what needs to be done to make sites accessible, I am often met with a blank look: Blind people use the internet? Deaf people listen to video? Most of us explore the web as a visual medium and we forget or simply don’t know about the wide range of tools and software applications that exist in the market to help all visitors take advantage of the internet.

Many governments, including the Ontario Provincial government, have enacted legislation requiring accessibility be at the forefront of service.

In Ontario, AODA was introduced in 2005. The Act provides for the development and enforcement of accessibility standards that apply to the private and public sectors across the province in order to identify, remove, and prevent barriers for people with disabilities.

This includes

  • customer service
  • transportation
  • information and communications
  • the physical environment, and
  • employment.

The proposed standards were created by Standards Development Committees (SDC), which consists of people with disabilities and experts in their field from the private sector and the public sector. Go to Service Ontario and follow the button to learn more about what the new legisation requires from your organization

Accessibility matters:

  • AODA applies to your organization,
  • why would you turn away a visitor just because they are disabled?

There are benefits to working towards compliance.

Standards

The first stage of AODA addresses customer service: removing barriers to customer service and enabling communications between your staff and the people you deal with.

Every organization is expected to have a plan and train their staff on how they intend to accommodate people with disabilities.

In terms of web development: “Designated public sector organizations and large organizations shall make their internet websites and web content conform with the World Wide Web Consortium Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, initially at Level A and increasing to Level AA, and shall do so in accordance with the schedule set out in this section.”

By January 1, 2016, all internet websites and web content must conform with WCAG 2.0 Level AA except in the areas of video captioning and audio, but these too will be required by 2020. “By January 1, 2020, all internet and intranet websites and web content must conform with WCAG 2.0 Level AA.”

Some industries, such as educational organizations, have further requirements to ensure their teaching methods and materials facilitate the needs of disabled people. In some cases, providing materials through your website in formats that are accessible, may provide a cost-effective solution.

To be compliant with AODA, it may not be necessary for you to do much at this stage, if your organization is small. Alternatively, you may be required to overhaul your entire website. You should also consider that Human Rights legislation can also compel you to make changes to your operations if a complaint is lodged against the organization.

What you do next should also take into account these considerations:

  • Usabilty: You may already be aware of the extensive information available concerning what makes a site usable for every visitor. Working on accessibility will help you recognize the factors that prevent your customers from completing transactions on your site(s). You improve usability across the board.
  • Sales and support: If 60% of people have some disability, you could easily double the number of potential customers navigating your site by becoming accessible and that is simply good marketing.
  • Ethics: In an age that demands corporate accountability and responsibility, the cost of ensuring accessibility is a small price to show you care.

Broadly speaking, there are 6 steps to take:

  1. Establish guidelines and publish them across your enterprise.
  2. Do an inventory of your online content. Where is your content? If you post content elsewhere, are these sites accessible? Can you edit your content to make it more accessible within these domains?
  3. Run a diagnostic of your own website(s) for compliance with Section 508 standards or W3C accessibility guidelines. Create a report that acts as a benchmark for the next step.
  4. Repair your content.
  5. Establish who has responsibility for monitoring all your online content across the enterprise and give them power to impose standards.
  6. Monitor your online content on an ongoing basis.

Some of the guidelines you might use are:

  • Provincial laws: in Ontario that would be AODA
  • WCAG 1.0 and WCAG 2.0
  • XML Accessibility Guidlines
  • US Section 508

Resources

Get a Quick Check of Your Website

If you would like a quick check of your own website you can run individual pages through the Cynthia Says Portal. The HiSoftware CynthiaSays portal is a joint Education and Outreach project of HiSoftware, ICDRI, and the Internet Society Disability and Special Needs Chapter.

Other Resources

For general information on AODA and training visit Osler law who provide an overview of the requirements and links.

Technical Resources

Checklists

Some of the Issues to Review

Remember that people with disabilities include more than the totally blind, deaf or paralyzed. People with low vision, tunnel vision, peripheral vision, colour blindness, palsies, poor hearing, etc., all benefit from the greater care AODA and W3 are demanding from web design.

There are potentially dozens of items to check for. Some of the most critical are

  • De-clutter pages to make them visually cohesive
  • Ensure good colour contrast between foreground and background
  • Make sure pages can still be read and layouts make sense, even when scripts and applets are turned off or are not supported
  • Pepper page markup with additional accessibility information
  • Avoid distracting movement and popups on the pages
  • Simplify navigation
  • Make the link text meaningful, i.e “2011 whitepaper on webpage accessibility” not “click here”
  • Warn people when a link is going to open a new window
  • Provide title texts for links
  • Choose fonts for their clarity
  • Provide text equivalents for non-text elements
  • Provide image alt tags that describe the image itself
  • Divide large blocks of information into manageable chunks
  • Provide paragraph texts at a size that can be easily read or use a re-size script or CSS option to provide alternative colour schemes and font sizes
  • Use the clearest, simplest language possible
  • Provide title tags for images, links and in forms
  • Be mindful of content interactions
  • Make graphics re-sizable or provide links to larger images and avoid placing key content in graphics without providing a text summary.
  • Make sure your HTML code is fully compliant
  • Avoid locking critical information into a single format, especially the more notoriously inaccessible which may include audio, video, Flash and PDF.
  • Provide alternative ways to reach content and avoid controls that require manual dexterity to operate.
  • MIND YOUR LANGUAGE. Be aware of how you word information. Most people are more strongly oriented to one sense than another and descriptions often follow the writer’s preference. Remember
    • some of your audience doesn’t know what sky-blue means;
    • push-button controls are not accessible for all, so what options do you provide
    • while explaining accessibility options, and throughout the copy, avoid disparaging terminology. The alternatives you provide for navigating the site  and distributing information are not there to help the disadvantaged, they are options of benefit to all visitors.