Crafted named winners at the PMW Global Awards — Google announces Crafted as one of the top eight EMEA agencies! — Crafted honored at the Drum Awards for Digital Experience — Crafted named winners at the PMW Global Awards — Google announces Crafted as one of the top eight EMEA agencies! — Crafted honored at the Drum Awards for Digital Experience — Crafted named winners at the PMW Global Awards — Google announces Crafted as one of the top eight EMEA agencies! — Crafted honored at the Drum Awards for Digital Experience —
CRAFTED LABS - Accessibility in digital
Achieving a more accessible web.
Moving web accessibility from a tick box exercise to a core consideration for digital.
Web accessibility is for everyone.
What do we mean by web accessibility? Essentially, it’s all about usability and clarity, about giving equal and equivalent online experiences to as many people as possible.
Why is it important?
Only 4% of the web is deemed accessible.
16% of the world's population have a significant disability, which means they need some sort of adaptation on web pages in order for them to access it. That corresponds to 1.3 billion people.
100% of people can benefit from accessible practices on a web page.
The European Commission recognises the importance of accessibility and is driving legal reform as a result. The European Accessibility Act (EAA) requires that many types of online experiences such as e-commerce websites and mobile apps, are accessible to people with disabilities. The Act was introduced in 2019 and has a deadline of June 2025 for providers of products and services covered by the EAA to comply.
It’s the right thing to do for all businesses and now it will also become a legal requirement for many.
What does web accessibility cover?
People often perceive accessibility in a simplistic way, i.e. how big the font is or the contrast of colour on a web page.
A colour accessibility checker taken from Crafted's brand guidelines.
However, achieving high levels of accessibility is about much more than this. Accessibility for all has to account for much more than visual impairments.
Before taking any action, it’s important to firstly understand different people’s needs. These could cover a variety of disabilities such as:
Visual
Auditory
Cognitive
Neurological
Physical
Speech
It also improves experiences for many people without disabilities. Such as those in environments where they can’t listen to audio or perhaps have a screen in bright sunlight.
With the rise of voice assistants, security tools such as fingerprint and Face ID, and the emergence of immersive technology, achieving access for all is more complex now than ever.
Some of those who are succeeding in delivering accessible experiences include:
The Sense homepage using tab functionality to reach the main content.
An approach for better accessibility.
The right mindset will help to improve your approach. It’s an easy trap to focus on improving your score in a tool (we’ll come on to those), but we should all approach accessibility with the mindset of wanting to improve online experiences for all. That means understanding the different needs and embedding their considerations throughout your teams and projects.
Level A – the minimum which every site should achieve by default.
Level AA – which is often the typical target for brands looking to support a good level of accessibility across their digital ecosystems.
Level AAA – The highest level of conformity which is generally reserved for specialist use cases such as Gov.uk.
Accessibility by design.
Each role involved in creating digital experiences should understand accessibility and how it applies to their roles. For example, at Crafted:
Designers – Consider accessibility from user journey mapping through to designing elements on a page. This early adoption of best practice makes it much easier to develop more accessible experiences.
QA test team – Review accessibility measures as part of our project testing, just as they would with any other testing variable.
Developers – Understand the right way to code a component, adding signpost and shortcuts to help users navigate a web experience in varying ways. For example, on crafted.co.uk using the tab function, an option appears to skip to the main content - this allows users navigating via keyboard to skip past any menu functionality and get straight to the content.
Crafted homepage 'skip to main content' functionality.
Continual improvement.
There is no start and finish to accessibility. Just like supporting better customer experiences, it should be an evolving process, that is reviewed and improves over time. Updates to websites, new content, changing technologies can all impact your accessibility, so we suggest routinely testing and evaluating your performance.
Where you have something which is less accessible than the top W3C standard, it may be a case of compromise or creating solutions to still strive towards a more accessible outcome. For example, on our own website, we use elements like animated text (such as the scrolling element below) which are less accessible than standard text and styling. To help support accessibility, we avoid using this for any descriptive information and we have an accessibility menu which allows users to stop any autoplay animation or videos across the site.
Crafted's onsite accessibility menu.
Testing your online experiences.
There are several ways to test how you perform. From something as simple as navigating your site without sound, or without a mouse/trackpad right through to full accessibility audits.
When it comes to auditing your web experiences, start with the critical functions, pages and user journeys first. By prioritising these, you enable people to access the most important elements of your product or service. You can then build out further from there.
Team insight
Toby, Senior Developer
The key thing when it comes to testing, is that no tool alone can determine accessibility. Human experiences, different perspectives and a combination of tools will help you to build a true picture.
Tools for testing.
The Markup Validator - a free tool by W3C that helps check the validity of web documents by highlighting issues in your markup. It helps to ensure web pages follow web standards, which improves accessibility, performance and compatibility across different browsers.
Lighthouse - An open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages. It allows a user to audit web pages for performance, accessibility, SEO, and best practices, offering detailed suggestions to help improve overall website quality.
WAVE - A suite of evaluation tools that helps authors make their web content more accessible to individuals with disabilities. WAVE tools can be used to detect accessibility issues by analysing the structure and content of web pages, helping ensure they are accessible to all users.
Accessibility Toolkit - An extension for Chrome that helps developers find and fix accessibility issues in web apps and sites. It offers two key features: FastPass, which quickly runs two tests to detect common accessibility problems in under five minutes, and Assessment, which provides a guided process to evaluate full accessibility compliance.
The challenge with all of these tools is that they are tested by machines. Often when launching large scale web projects, brands will use qualitative testing such as focus groups alongside insight derived from different automated tools. Accessibility should be no different. However, typical focus groups are unlikely to provide the diversity needed to understand how you perform.
Companies such as Open Inclusion are positively addressing disability and age-inclusion through their inclusive research and insight approach. This research will unlock insight and help drive forward inclusive accessibility practices across your web experiences.
Conclusion.
Everyone should be able to navigate, engage with and enjoy the web. While legislation has been slow in coming, the need to support more accessible online experiences is ever present. The conversation is growing, and we hope this article helps to prompt action too. It’s complicated and has vast implications, but sharing best practices and bringing it into your processes will help support a more inclusive web for all.
Like many, we’re always evolving our understanding and processes around accessibility. If you have any comments or ideas to include in this piece, please reach out to us.
Looking for expert support? Our team can help you with your accessibility improvement journey.
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