For most of us, ordering from an online store is a two-minute proposition. For Josh Basile, it can be agony.
Basile became a C4 quadriplegic in 2004 when a wave picked him up and tossed him onto his neck during a beach run. A rebellious man, he earned his law degree, launched the world's largest video tutoring network for people with paralysis, and became a tireless advocate for laws that support people with disabilities.
But for him and many other people with disabilities, simply browsing a website can be a slow and frustrating experience. "There are about seven million websites that meet accessibility guidelines, but 100 million that don't," said Basile, community relations manager for accessiBe, a company that automates aspects of website accessibility compliance. "I want to have the same experience as everyone else."
A small minority meets
Unfortunately, more than 13 years after the World Wide Web Consortium published the first guidelines for web content accessibility, fewer than 2% of websites are usable by all people with disabilities, estimates Mark Shapiro, president of the Office of Internet Accessibility. “Nobody does it on purpose; they just don't think about it,” he said.
They are missing a big problem. More than a quarter of the US population identifies with a disability, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Its disposable income is close to €500 billion. People whose disabilities make it difficult to read text on the screen, control a mouse, or watch a video are virtually excluded from most online experiences. The same is true, to a lesser extent, for people who are prone to seizures, have difficulty concentrating, or have dyslexia.
While the Americans with Disabilities Act outlines physical accommodation rules and penalties for noncompliance, the WCAG guidelines have always been voluntary. That may be about to change. As websites have become indispensable to shopping and working during the pandemic, digital accessibility lawsuits have skyrocketed to more than 4000 cases in the United States in 2020, more than double the total in 2018.
In its 2022 forecast, Forrester Research noted that the number of job postings with "accessibility" in the title increased by 78% from July 2020 to July 2021 and said it expects accessibility to be a top priority for organizations. who buy technology this year.
Integrated Compliance
Compliance with accessibility standards isn't hard to achieve if you follow the guidelines when creating a website, Shapiro said. "If people understand what needs to be done, that's just part of the process," he said, though he acknowledged that "going back can take a long time."
The basic accessibility guidelines can be summarized to "complement the spoken with the visual and the visual with the spoken," Shapiro said. “Think about the images in the text for people who can't see them. If you use text, make sure a colorblind person can read it.
While the WCAG guidelines are very detailed, the basics of accessibility boil down to a few general principles:
- The entire website must be navigable from a keyboard.
- The size of the text should be variable for people with visual disabilities.
- The video must be subtitled.
- The text must be compatible with audio screen readers.
- All images must have alternative text descriptions.
- Users should have the ability to turn off flickering or moving images.
Design vs Access
Design is often the enemy of usability, Shapiro said. Heading tags (H1, H2, etc.) were originally meant to indicate hierarchy, but designers often mix them up for aesthetic reasons, wreaking havoc with screen readers. "If you have 25 H1 tags, you're not thinking about how people with disabilities will use the page," he said.
Some of Basil's common frustrations include dropdowns that don't work with a keyboard, hyperlinks that aren't clearly marked, and forms that can't be navigated with a tab key. Field validation rules that block visitors using a keyboard in a cell from completing a transaction are proof that "developers didn't take into account that not everyone uses a mouse," Shapiro said.
Automation can help, but just to point out. Machine transcription systems are pretty good at deciphering conversational speech, but they choke on proper names in technical terms. Many tools can scan websites for accessibility issues and suggest solutions, but human intervention is always required at some level. Shapiro recalled an example of alt text describing an image as a "photo of a man in a blue shirt with a child." The photo actually showed the man holding a child at gunpoint. "You have to explain not just what's in the image, but why the image is there," he said.
Getting a basic website accessibility audit is easy and inexpensive, and there are many reasons why you should. 500 billion of them, in fact.
So read this:
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