Ensuring your online presence is inclusive and reachable to all audiences seems like yet another headache to do with designing your website. Maybe that’s part of the reason why only about 3% of the internet is fully accessible to people with disabilities (WebAIM, 2024).

1.3 billion people worldwide, or 16% of the global population, experience significant disabilities (WHO, 2011). Pragmatically speaking, that’s a lot of potential clients you might be missing out on by not making your content fully accessible. Not only this, following these guidelines can improve overall user experience and even boost SEO as browsers favour accessible content (Accessibility Checker, 2024).

I thought to write this specifically to you, as you work with languages and thus care about communication. I’ll try not to waste your time so you’ll have to forgive me if this gets a little fact-dense.

Legal Framework of Web Content Accessibility

The main set of standards for web content accessibility are The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

These standards outline specific recommendations for improving accessibility, ensuring it is usable by everyone, including people who are blind, deaf, or have motor or cognitive impairments.

The web content must adhere to the following principles, helpfully acronymed POUR:

P – Perceivable: Making Information and Interface Elements Detectable

Information and user interface components must be presented in ways that users can perceive. For example, providing text alternatives for images and ensuring content is readable by screen readers.

O – Operable: Enabling Interaction with Interface Elements and Navigation

User interface components and navigation must be operable. This includes making sure people can interact with all elements of a website using a keyboard or other assistive technologies.

U – Understandable: Ensuring Comprehension of Information and Interface Operation

Information and the operation of the user interface must be understandable. This can involve things like using clear, simple language and ensuring that instructions are easy to follow.

R – Robust: Ensuring Compatibility with Current and Future Technologies

Content must be robust enough to work well with current and future user tools. This involves following best practices for code and compatibility with screen readers or other technologies.

WCAG Conformance Levels

There are three conformance levels rated according to their complexity: A, AA and AAA. I’d recommend we focus on AA, a practical and achievable level that is typically the target for most organizations aiming to make their websites more inclusive.

AA (Mid-range Accessibility)

Achieving this level ensures that a given site is accessible to a large portion of users with a wide range of disabilities without the need for extreme or complex modifications.

Some steps you could take right now:

Contrast

Make sure there is enough contrast between the text and background so the text is easily legible. Note: You might want to be careful as too much contrast is harmful to the eyes of your audience.

Text Alternatives

Provide text alternatives for multimedia content – captions for images and video are most common here.

Keyboard Navigation

Make the website keyboard-navigable – not everyone can use a mouse so this is a useful fallback option.

Please let me know if you’d like some more pointers, or a practical demonstration. Take care,

Karo

Resources:

WebAIM Million Report
WebAIM. (2024). Million: The state of web accessibility. Retrieved from https://webaim.org/projects/million/

World Report on Disability
World Health Organization. (2011). World report on disability. Retrieved from https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789241564182

Accessibility SEO Impact Study
Accessibility Checker. (2024). Accessibility SEO Impact Study. Retrieved from https://www.accessibilitychecker.org/research-papers/accessibility-seo-impact-study/