Website accessibility
Ensuring that online content and digital content is accessible and navigable for people with a variety of disabilities is an essential element of ensuring meaningful access to the internet.
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Ensuring that online content and digital content is accessible and navigable for people with a variety of disabilities is an essential element of ensuring meaningful access to the internet.
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Was this helpful?
Many websites and platforms are not accessible without additional support such as (e.g. text enlargers and keyboards with large keys for those with vision impairments, text-readers and live captions for those who are deaf and/or blind).
Online content that provides accessible keyboard navigation, inclusion of alternative text, speech to text interfaces, image to speech interfaces, clear language and accessible font colors and sizes ensure a wider audience can access the content.
In the most basic form, to improve accessibility considerations regarding color contrast, fonts, links, image descriptions, mobile device compatibility and the ability to resize content go far in widening access. Ensuring that assistive technologies are also able to navigate, read and understand online content goes even further in ensuring accessibility.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is an international standard designed to help web content developers, web accessibility tools developers and others to ensure their websites are more accessible for those with disabilities.
is currently still in working draft form, but is the most updated version of these standards.
WCAG operates on four principles of accessibility:
Perceivable: information and interfaces are shown in ways users can “perceive” (e.g. visible to at least some of their senses: touch, sound, sight)
Operable: Interfaces must be operable for users to navigate regardless of ability. This means allowing for assistive devices and a range of ways to navigate digital content.
Understandable: Users must be able to understand the information presented and how to access it
Robust: content must be strong enough that it can be accessed by a diverse range of users and assistive technologies
WCAG 2.0 has a series of to determine if websites are in conformance with their standards.
They have a rubric of A, AA and AAA.
Level A: The minimum criteria is met, meaning the website “satisfies the level A success criteria”
Level AA: The website meets all level A as well as AA standards. Many websites attempt to reach AA conformance .
Level AAA, the highest grade, means the website meets the highest level of standards. Below is a selection of tools you can use to help you check if a website is accessible:
The site also offers a number of other accessibility resources.
The which can be used for assessing if Wordpress themes are accessible. This checker does not check for compliance with standards but can identify some common issues such as adding alt text, adding post labels, allowing for resizing, adding to HTML attributes, etc.
A longer list of accessibility plug-ins and tools can be found .
allows you to check your website against the American with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
W3C's helps you to assess the accessibility of your web page, taking into account elements like images and audio, page titles and headings, links, color contrast, form checks and other document elements.
You can get an overview in their .
Popular browser extensions include: (Chrome, Firefox and Edge), (Chrome, Firefox and Edge) and (Chrome).
IBM also has anthat can be used on Chrome, Firefox and Edge as well as a toolkit for design elements on Github and Figma.
The can be used for assessing if specific WordPress themes are accessible.
