Web Content Accessibility

What makes a website accessible?

An accessible website has content that has been crafted, structured and optimized to convey online information for everyone to use, understand and enjoy.

The idea is that, no matter your range of abilities, no matter where you are accessing the information from, or from what type of device, content should be equally available to everyone with internet connection.

Web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG)

WCAG principles

The World Wide Web Consortium is at the centre of the global initiative to make web content accessible. The Consortium has identified four related principles of web content accessibility : perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. The following information helps explain these principles.

Accessible web content examples

Written content that is easy to understand, without jargon, so everyone understands it.

Correctly formatted with structured headings so important information easy to identify.

Image relevancy and meaning

Relevant images in your content that contribute value and meaning to a user should offer the same meaning to all users.

Important imagery should include alt tags to describe the image when it’s not able to be viewed by someone with poor vision: Assistive technology reads out what is in the alt tags so vision impaired users get an understanding of the image.

Tables

Tables need to be correctly formatted, and used only for tabulated data. The information in the table is listed in columns and rows and relate to the heading or each column and/or row. Tables with correct heading tags and data tags allows screen readers to understand the data cell-by-cell in relation to the heading of the column or row.

Tables are not used for layout.

Functionality

Content with important functionality like online forms must be easy to use on all devices.

Page load time

No one wants to wait too long for web content to load. Depending on your business and audience, we generally can’t assume that all our users have fast internet connection. Optimized content and tidy back-end code will help ensure web page load times are kept to a minimum.

Design

Responsive design so that content that’s easy to read and see on all devices; colour palette that is easy to distinguish.

Videos

Closed captions on video content to assist those who are hearing impaired.

Who benefits from an accessible website?

All users benefit from a website designed and developed to meet web content accessibility guidelines. Why? Everyone benefits from content that is:

  • easily understood

  • correctly formatted

  • easily found available on all devices — no matter how slow or fast the internet connection

  • accessible in environments with light or sound restrictions.

Website owners also benefit from web content that’s accessible

An accessible website has content developed to enable engagement and ease of use. A search engine like Google takes note when humans spend time engaging with web content. In time, an accessible website’s ranking on a search engine results page will likely improve because of this factor — Google rewards websites that are formatted well, that have easy-to-read content, with fast load times.