The main objective of this site is to simplify learning understanding and implementing accessibility.
According to UN Reports, around 10% of the world's population lives with some form of disability or the other. This figure comes to round about 650 million people worldwide .
Accessibility is the degree to which a product, device, service or environment is available to as many people as possible, including different Persons with Disabilities like Visually challenged, Hearing Impaired, Orthopedically challenged and Learning disabled.
The inclusive practice of making websites and web applications usable by people of all abilities and disabilities is referred to as Web Accessibility. When sites are correctly designed, developed and edited, all users can have equal access to information and functionality.
When websites are correctly designed, developed and edited following guidelines for Accessibility such as Web Content Accessibility Guidelines , Please refer WCAG 2.0 all users can have equal access to information and functionality. WCAG 2.0 is the de facto standard for implementing web accessibility worldwide. Different persons with disabilities use Assistive Technologies like screen readers and magnifiers to read web content. Assistive Technologies is a broad term used to describe assistive, adaptive, and rehabilitative devices used by different people with disabilities. Also there are several important Legal, Financial, Technical and social factors useful for implementing accessibility.
The Web is an increasingly important resource in many aspects of life such as education, employment, government, commerce, health care, recreation, and more. It is essential that the Web be accessible in order to provide equal access and equal opportunity to people with disabilities.
Often people have misconception as accessibility is only for screen reader users, but in fact accessibility is for all. An accessible Web can give you more advantages beyond social inclusion as follows.
Here are some of the benefits of implementing accessibility
- Makes your websites compliant to different worldwide accessibility standards
- Protects your company from possible future legal hassles.
- Gives you the advantage of ISO/IEC 40500:2012 standard’s compliance.
- Search engine optimization (SEO) leading to direct and indirect cost savings.
- Improves interoperability and quality of the product.
- In short you can say , IT'S THE RIGHT THING TO DO
Search Engine Optimization is one of the major advantages of implementing accessibility which comes by default. Accessibility and SEO come hand in hand.
Many of the search engine algorithms overlaps with accessibility best practices like appropriate page title, meaningful links(not having only click here, more etc), semantic heading mark up, images with appropriate alternate text and audio/videos with transcripts and Captions. See more @ SEO section in Semantic Markup. Thus following accessibility helps indexing your content well by search engines, thereby gets you more traffic.
Following a semantic markup and table less layout for separating content from presentation, and responsive design will render your content well across the browsers and devices such as mobile and tablets. Thus reduces the cost of maintaining device dependency web sites
Usability and accessibility co-relates. Pages with good color contrast are easy to read including for persons with low vision, senior citizens, and color deficiency users, pages with consistent layout and content in plane language will be understandable to basic internet users and cognitive(learning) disabled, and videos with captions/sub titles helps understanding non-English speaking users and hearing impaired users Accessible content will be usable but the converse need not be true, for example an input field with spanned label text helps understands to sited users what the control is but is not accessible to screen reader users.. Thus accessibility helps your content usable to widest audiences.
Over 10% (1 billion) of global population is disabled as per World Health Organization ( WHO )latest report, fortunately due to advent of various Assistive technologies most of them are able to access the web. But less than 10% of the websites are accessible so far, making your site accessible gets you these potential customers.
These days growing number of countries have accessibility legislations. With the inception of UNCRPD ( United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disability ) in 2007, 153 countries signed and ratified, which requires accessibility under article 9, some countries just have a legislation and some have both legislation and own guidelines(example, US has Section 508 Amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and India has GIGW) as per UNCRPD. Some developed countries like US, UK and Australia has accessibility legislation since many years. If your website does not meet the Accessibility Guidelines, then the website owner could be sued for discrimination.
In 2006 Target Corporation was sued for $6 Million to make its web site accessible. Here is some Accessibility Legislations
- US: ADA(Americans with Disability Act) and Section 508 Amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973
- UK: Equality Act 2010
- Australia: DDA(Disability Discrimination ACT 1992
|International||Web Content Accessibility Guidelines WCAG 2.0 developed by World Wide Web Consortium W3C|
|Country Specific||US||Section 508 Amendments to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 Section 508|
|UK||UK: Equality Act 2010|
Accessibility signifies the fact that ultimately anything on the web is going to be used by humans. So it has to be universal and inclusive.
Over the past few years support for accessible products and services have grown exponentially. As an Accessibility Engineer working in this field for past 2 years , I have experienced a remarkable shift in the manner in which our clients are acknowledging the fact that accessibility is here to stay and is good for their businesses in the long run. They are appreciating , supporting and rewarding our efforts in making their products and services inclusive and universally accepted. This is a welcome change for the future. This is just in a series of articles I have written on topics related to accessibility , assistive technologies , inclusive web design , usability ,accessible products and services, WAI-ARIA etc. . To know more please go through this site in detail ,which I plan to update from time to time.