There are many good reasons to make sure your site is accessible – an accessible site is available to a wider range of visitors, and in some cases may even be a legal requirement. On top of these, many of the most important accessibility considerations are also simple good design practices, which will help make sure your site performs correctly in all cases. If you are unsure about your site's accessibility, or are planning a new site and require advice on the subject, you may be interested in the web services offered by our studio team. You may also simply want to find out a little more about web accessibility – so for this purpose, we've put together this basic guide to help you get started.

What is web accessibility?

Web accessibility is simply the practice of presenting your web content in a way that allows all visitors to enjoy it equally. The Open and Closed Project (who attempts to define standards for video captioning and audio description) define accessibility thus:

“ ‘Accessibility’ is generally understood to refer to the needs of people with disabilities, but it can be defined more generally as accommodating characteristics a person cannot change (or cannot change easily). An inability to hear or see is similar to an inability to understand a particular language. ”

There are many things to consider when assessing whether your site is accessible, but not all of them apply in some cases – the measures to consider depend on the content in question. If you have designed and planned your site effectively, many of these issues will already have been dealt with!

The basics

There are a few very basic points to consider when creating or assessing accessible web content – most of which are also good practice when writing any online material:

• Well structured, semantic markup: Almost all web documents are structured in HTML or XHTML. It is vital that these documents are marked up as semantically as possible – that is, each piece of content is enclosed with the most meaningful HTML element available. So, for example, headings and paragraphs should be marked up appropriately (a heading might use an h1 or h2 element, and paragraphs will use p). This is of particular help to users of screenreaders, but is also a vital part of making sure your content is usable across the board. It is also important for search engine optimisation – GoogleBot, which is the program Google uses to build its search listings, accesses your site in a very similar way to a screenreader.
• Visually accessible content: Once a document is marked up in your preferred markup language, it is ready to be styled. This should be acheived using CSS, a method of applying a site's visual appearance to the HTML document. This is important because it separates the visual information (fonts, colours, and layout) from the actual text content of the page. Using the example of a blind user with a screenreader, which 'reads' the content out loud, this allows the user to ignore any presentational information (which they don't need) and access the content directly. All modern browsers also allow users to increase or decrease the size of the text on your page, which means that the site may not display in the same way you originally intended. It is vital that your layout can accommodate these changes – a badly designed site will act strangely under these circumstances, making content unreadable to a visually-impaired viewer who requires a more legible text size. You should also consider text contrast (making sure your text colour is suitably different from the background) and the way links appear – colour-blind viewers may have trouble seeing links which are differentiated only by colour.
• Well-written text: Confusing, jargon-filled, or badly-written content is a major issue, both for accessibility and in general. Unfortunately, it's also less simple to suggest hard-and-fast solutions for this problem, beyond a well-thought out vetting process for your web content, or hiring a professional copywriter. Well written, useful content is not just an accessibility concern, however – it will benefit all users to your site, cause you to rank higher in search engines, and improve the overall usefulness of your whole online presence.
• Test, test, test: A final piece of advice – make sure you test your site on a wide range of equipment, at every stage of the project. This should at least include testing on displays of different resolution and size, and on different browsers and operating systems. You may also want to include testing on non-standard devices – many people now access web content on mobile phones or PDAs. This will help you to ensure that your site's content will be available to everyone. It can be difficult (and expensive) to test on assistive technology such as screenreaders. In these cases, following best practices (such as those listed above) should mean that your page's content remains accessible.

Advanced web accessibility

If your site is mainly text and images, following these guidelines will help ensure your content is available to everyone, whatever equipment they use to access it. However, many sites now feature more advanced forms of content – applications like YouTube have finally helped online video to gain widespread appeal. We can help you implement captioning, subtitling, and sign language into your existing video content, allowing you to offer it to all users. We can also help if you need other multimedia content for your site: audio descriptions or podcasts (downloadable audio).