Accessibility
The typical definition of Accessibility is to make something usable to as many people as possible. In the web world, the term can be used synonymously with Web Compliance.
Ok, so what’s Web Compliance?
Simply put, Web Compliance is a set of guidelines developers must follow to ensure their products are easy to use for everyone, regardless of ability. These guidelines are referred to as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
Individuals with disabilities, such as blindness, are users also. They can’t interact with a website the same way a non-disabled user can. So pages must be made with an additional mindset to accommodate them, which is what WCAG helps provide.
WCAG specifically applies to web content and is required for federal and state agencies. Otherwise, they fall into the risk of lawsuits.
There are also the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) and the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG).
Click here to read more about them.
ATAG applies to authoring tools that help create and publish digital content. This includes Content Management Systems (CMS) such as WordPress, Wix, Squarespace and other web publishing tools.
UUAG applies to web browsers and media players.
All right then, where did these guidelines come from?
WCAG is developed and published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as part of their Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).
What’s an example of Accessibility on the web?
It takes several elements to make a website and each element can have its own set of accessibility rules. Some of these include rules that can be very easily overlooked.
One small task that makes a huge difference is adding alternative text to images, 1.1.1 Non-text Content (Level A).
- An individual with impaired vision needs to use a screen reader to navigate a website. The screen reader reads the code behind a page to understand its layout while looking for specific tags and attributes. It can then read aloud the content displayed. When it comes across an image, the alt text is read back out to the user. If there is no alt text, it may read back out the file name instead. You know, the weird letters and numbers on the file when you take a photo such as DSC001.
Other guidelines require: easily readable content, proper text color contrast, focusable web elements and a whole lot of HTML Aria attributes.
You can find more guidelines for developers listed on W3C’s Quick Reference page or WCAG’s blog.
That’s Accessibility in a nutshell. But this barely scratches the surface on the topic. You can check out the following articles to read more in-depth about the standards and different levels of compliance.
Read W3C’s Essential Components of Web Accessibility
Read the ADA’s page of Website Compliance
Why is the Department of Justice involved?
On April 8, 2024, the DOJ signed a new rule that obligates state and local governments to make their websites and mobile apps accessible. This rule will target public programs and services like schools and healthcare providers. The purpose of this rule is to grant easy access to important services (government services, voting, applying for benefits and more) to anyone regardless of ability.
The rule states that entities must comply up to the WCAG 2.1 Level AA success criteria.
What will be affected?
Targeted elements include markup (HTML), text, images, audio, videos, controls, animations and conventional electronic documents.
The markup defines the structure, presentation and interactions of the content. For example, a typical homepage contains a navigation menu for users to click on, a hero area to display image or video banners, the main body content and a footer. Each of these elements can have their own sets of code but create the entire page when put together.
Conventional electronic documents refer to PDF, Word Doc, PowerPoint, and spreadsheet files. They are typically non-accessible by default, unless the authors created them to be compliant. PDFs are so common yet very inaccessible that we restricted the upload of these files at where I work. Alternatively, they should be recreated as web forms or web pages.
Deadline
The rule went into effect on June 24, 2024 and declares two different deadlines.
An entity with a total population of 50,000 or more has until April 24, 2026 to comply. Whereas every other entity has until April 26, 2027.
Is it odd that smaller entities have a longer timeframe to comply than the larger ones? Well, the rule recognizes that they may face challenges implementing the new requirements.
The term “total population” here refers to the population estimate calculated by the United States Census Bureau, as stated in Subpart A of the rule. It also defines the population differently depending on the type of entity. But it essentially is the number of people in your organization.
Exceptions
There are some content that won’t be affected by this rule:
Archived web content – any content created before the date the entity needs to comply by. So that means we don’t need to fix anything we have now, right? Wrong. The rule continues to state that this specific content is kept exclusively for recordkeeping and will not be updated after the deadline. In addition, it will need to be clearly identified as archived.
So you can’t get away with this exception if you’re continually working on your website.
Pre Existing conventional electronic documents – any documents that aren’t being used as applications.
Content posted by a third party – now this exception can be seen as a bit ambiguous.
One will read this exception as any content posted by an outside group doesn’t need to comply unless they are contracted or licensed by the public entity to post for them.
So a vendor who’s posting blogs or providing SEO for an entity’s website should fall under this exception. Using tools like WordPress would be off the hook also, since they’re not built by the companies who use it.
What about plugins that require subscriptions to post content, such as the Advanced Custom Fields plugin for WordPress?
Equalize Digital implies that plugins may not fall into this exception. Thus they will need to comply.
Individualized, password-protected or otherwise secured conventional electronic documents – any documents that contain personal information about an individual and/or are password protected.
Pre existing social media posts – any social media posts made before the compliance date. However, social media posts created after the deadline will need to comply.
What’s the point of it all?
For most people, to prevent lawsuits. But it truly should be to make content easy to use for everyone.
When we move away from the preventive view of it all, we can find benefits in making our sites inclusive.
For instance, it will open up opportunities for disabled users to interact with it. That will increase web traffic. If you sell on your website, that leads to more customers.
It also improves SEO. Sites will easily be picked up by search engines and gain more exposure. Again, this leads to more web traffic and customers.
Overall, it makes for a better user experience..
We may never reach a perfect level of compliance. It’s impossible for huge entities to maintain zero accessibility issues consistently. Especially those with several users or developers working on a website.
Rules can change, developers can overlook issues and code can become outdated. The most important thing is that we try to keep up.
Takeaways
- Accessibility is a vital standard to make websites easy to use for disabled users, as well as non-disabled users.
- Web developers can follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to make their content and websites accessible.
- Web compliance on a website is required at a federal and state level. So government and university sites must comply.
- Not following accessibility can result in lawsuits and hurting the entity’s reputation.
- The Department of Justice is enforcing federal and state level entities to make their products comply with WCAG 2.1 Level AA success criteria within the next couple of years.
- DOJ’s new rule went into effect on June 24, 2024.
- Developers can expect a surge of requests to make their products more accessible.
- Reaching 0 accessibility issues may be impossible but it’s better to have very few issues than many.