Introduction to Accessibility
Estimated Time: 30 minutes
As explained in the video above, web accessibility involves ensuring that websites and applications are usable for all users including those with disabilities, impairments and/or limitations. Ensuring colors used in your design meet the minimum contrast ratio specified by WCAG, adding descriptive tags to images for users using screen readers and ensuring the purpose of links can be identified by the link text are just a few examples of steps designers and developers can take to make websites and applications more accessible.
Accessibility isn’t just about designing for people with disabilities though, it’s also about the mediums through which people interact with websites/applications. Some companies allow users to interact with their products across web, mobile, smartwatches, etc. As the mediums through which people interact with these companies’ products change, the experiences across these mediums also need to be optimized. This is what accessibility is about, making sure that all people have equal access to digital products regardless of what disabilities/impairments/limitations they have or what medium they choose to use.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are a set of regularly updated guidelines published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that provide a benchmark against which the accessibility of websites and applications can be evaluated. There are three levels; A, AA and AAA. Websites/applications with an accessibility rating of AAA are considered to be very accessible, this is the highest level achievable, while websites/applications with an accessibility rating of A are considered to be slightly accessible. Websites/applications that totally ignore accessibility will not reach A level of compliance, this can negatively affect seo rankings, brand image, etc. As an early stage designer, it may be difficult to get your team to agree to meet AA or AAA level of WCAG compliance. In these cases, best practice would be to encourage your team to at least meet A level compliance of WCAG. As your team and its resources mature, you can then push for AA level compliance and much later, AAA level.
Implementation and Resources
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0)
Above is a link to the official WCAG 2.0 (the second iteration of WCAG). The document covers everything about WCAG 2.0 including; what WCAG 2.0 is, what the guidelines are, how to meet the guidelines at A, AA and AAA levels of compliance, etc. It's an exhaustive document on WCAG 2.0 meaning it can be difficult to go through. Based on this, a link to a summarized checklist has been added below which highlights the guidelines which need to be met to reach A and AA levels of compliance. For this lesson, you only need to go through the checklist document. You can go through the actual WCAG 2.0 document later on so you know what each level of compliance entails.
As mentioned previously, the link above highlights what guidelines need to be met to reach A and AA levels of compliance of WCAG 2.0. From the checklist, you may notice that most of the implementations that need to be made to comply with WCAG 2.0 need to be made by developers. This is because, as mentioned at the beginning of this course, building successful products requires collaboration. As well as the many other things designers and developers need to collaborate on, they also need to collaborate on accessibility.
Collection of Useful Resources on Accessibility
Above is a link to a collection of useful resources (articles and tools) for accessibility. The collection includes links to tools you can use for checking color accessibility and other articles and documentations that are useful as you get more familiar with building accessibile digital products.