ARTICLE
A Practical Roadmap to Website Accessibility
Are you worried about how accessible your website is? If you need to wonder, it's likely that your site does in fact have problems that make it hard for some of your visitors to use.
Unless the site was built recently with a specific focus on accessibility, and unless you have ongoing processes to check your links, images, and documents are inclusive, then your site probably has issues that need fixing to be truly welcoming to everyone. A number of the problems could require specialty knowledge to identify and are expensive to correct. In fact, it might be less expensive just to rebuild the front end of your website—the part that controls how your site looks— than to find and fix the issues.
While adding an accessibility plugin to your website might seem like a quick fix, these tools can sometimes do more harm than good. They help some visitors, but they can also interfere with the built-in features of the browser that people with disabilities depend on when they visit other websites.
Start by looking at the things that you have straightforward control over: your text and images. Then, consider overall site design and structure will require more planning.
So what should you do? Certainly don’t give up on accessibility. Start by looking at the things that you have relatively straightforward control over: your text and images. Overall site design and structure will require more planning. Let’s talk about each of those two areas, step by step.
Text and Images
You can make a big difference in accessibility by updating your text, images, and videos. It may not be a quick process, especially if you have a lot of pages, but if you have access to your content, you can make important changes.
Make text scannable. All of your visitors will benefit from pages that are broken up to be easily scannable, but this is especially useful to those that may be disabled in some way. Break text into small paragraphs, with more headers and bullet points. Avoid lengthy link lists.
Use descriptive text links. Make sure the text of your website’s links conveys where the link will lead. Avoid link text like 'click here' or “read more”; instead, use clear phrases like '2021 Annual Report' or 'How to Get Your Security Deposit Back.' This is important for screen reader users who often skim from link to link quickly, and helps all visitors who are scanning the page.
Provide alt-text for images. All photos that provide information should have alt-text, so that people who are visually disabled or on a slow internet connection (with graphics turned off) can understand them. This information should describe the context, so not “headshot of Laura S. Quinn”, but “Headshot of Laura S. Quinn, a caucasian 50ish woman with glasses and chin length hair”
Put captions on your videos. These are useful both for people who can’t hear and for those who are watching without sound. Auto-captioning can make this fairly straightforward, though make sure to review the captions and clean up any errors that were auto-generated.
Avoid relying on PDFs. PDFs can be hard to use, especially for people with disabilities. Try to use web pages instead of PDFs, and break lengthy reports into multiple pages linked together. This also helps your site show up better in search results.
Create a process to continue these best practices. Make sure someone is in charge of your accessibility policies, and they work with your content creators to make each new piece of content accessible.
Overall Site Design and Structure
Updating your content is helpful, but unfortunately, there is still quite a way to go to make an older site fully accessible. Technical aspects, like how your headers, buttons and form fields are structured, can also make a big difference to visitors with disabilities.
If your website is built with a platform that offers limited graphic design customization, like SquareSpace or Wix, that puts you in a good position when it comes to structural accessibility. These platforms are regularly updated and tend to be quite accessible, particularly if you select templates with strong color contrast and larger fonts.
If you’re using a different platform, how do you know what problems your site has? You likely don’t actually need to know. Auditing your site for accessibility can be complex and costly. Often, unless your site was initially designed with accessibility in mind, the audit reveals a long list of expensive issues. A practical approach is to assume your site has significant accessibility challenges and focus on rebuilding the front-end theme (the part that controls the design). Typically, creating a new theme is more cost-effective than trying to retrofit an old one to meet accessibility standards.
For those using a modern content management system (CMS) like WordPress or Drupal, updating your theme isn't an enormous project. The cost could start from around $500 for a basic site with a few page templates and can go up to a few thousand dollars for a mid-sized site.
Creating a Roadmap
Focus first on your text, links and images, as these improvements are important no matter what you do next. If you redo your theme or even your whole site, those updates will be carried along.
Put policies in place for ensuring that new content will be optimized for accessibility. Move away from PDFs, and make sure your content creators know what to do to make their information available to all users.
As you work on your content, plan your budget for re-theming your site. Or you may want to determine its place within a larger web project. Think about updating the graphic design during the re-theming process, as these two elements are interconnected. If your site isn’t on a modern CMS, you’re more likely to need a complete redesign. Regardless of the scope of your project, put a target start date on the calendar and outline how you’ll accrue the money to cover the costs.
In short, addressing accessibility issues on your website is likely to be a long term process. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start. By starting with simple improvements and planning for bigger changes, you can make your site more welcoming to everyone.
Many thanks to Stephen Musgrave and Jason Day who commented on an earlier version of this article and helped to add the important focus on content and process. Any mistakes are my own!