Skip to content

Beyond Inclusion: The Importance of Accessible Web Content and Design

Contributed by Kat Shereko

Overview

Companies spend a lot of their marketing dollars researching their users and developing inclusive web content. However, many companies aren’t doing their due diligence of making that content accessible for persons with disabilities. From headlines and form fields, to the use of images and color contact, the majority of websites today are not up to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. In the US, there are 22 million working-age adults with disabilities. That’s an immense number of underserved individuals with a lot of buying power.

In this LavaCon session, Kat Shereko covered:

  1. What web accessibility is and how it relates to WCAG
  2. The differences between WCAG compliance levels (A, AA, AAA)
  3. Where web accessibility overlaps with SEO and UX
  4. How to optimize web content for WCAG standards
  5. How to make a case for making web content more accessible

Key Takeaways

From this session, I discovered a lot about how inaccessible some web content can be for persons with disabilities. Prior to watching this presentation, I assumed that most web content was up to par with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, but the presenter talked through how a majority of companies utilize their funds to hone in on the inclusivity of their target audience, but lack an overall concentration on those with disabilities. According to the CDC, "61 million adults (26%) in the US live with a disability". This is important to note because if your website content is not compliant with WCAG standards, you may lose users that would otherwise engage with this content. In terms of the differences in compliance levels, their are essentially three tiers:

  • A
  • AA
  • AAA

A level compliance usually refers to those who may not have tried to design their site with persons with disabilities in mind, but still incorporated some of those practices in their content. AA level compliance refers to websites that are legally compliant with the standards, and AAA compliance refers to those who go above-and-beyond in terms of the usability of their content. The general process of meeting these standards involves choosing a level of compliance, auditing content in accordance to these standards, and crafting an accessibility statement. Examples of good compliance with accessibility standards includes the usage of clean, easy-to-follow heading structure, quality Alt Attributes for images, and mobile friendly, keyboard accessible form fields.

Reflection

In general, I found this LavaCon presentation to be very informative. Over the last year or so, I have become increasingly more interested in UX design and content usability, so this video provided me with a lot of insight on this field. Before viewing this presentation, I never really considered how persons with disabilities played a role in content creation and usability. Taking into account how people who are visually impaired and need to use screen readers, or those who are hard of hearing and rely on transcripts for audio visual files is something that is definitely on my radar now. Overall, I really appreciated how in-depth this presentation was, and how easy it was to follow and understand the information that was being presented! Provided here is a link to some additional accessibility videos provided by Nielson Norman Group NNg Videos