AccessiCart

Have a US business that improved accessibility in 2024? You might be eligible for a tax credit! Read more about the requirements in this post. https://buff.ly/3TbT6aJ

Accessibility is best maintained when everyone on the team does their part: devs, designers, content folks and QA. This great post breaks down these responsibilities by team roles.

Good color contrast is an easy to fix accessibility issue. Learn more about how to test and fix color contrast in this post. https://buff.ly/3KgraOV

Our CEO Bet Hannon outlined accessibility compliance for eCommerce in a special event for the WooCommerce Developer Community recently. If you missed it, here's a link to catch up with eCommerce compliance requirements. https://buff.ly/4gHRXSF

Alt text on PRODUCT images is a little different. You focus on describing the product, not what's happening in the image. Learn more in this post. https://buff.ly/3kOxwN4

Google search algorithms are factoring in user experience more than ever. While Google is not explicitly measuring accessibility, improving accessibility improves user experience, which should help people find you. Check out this post from our friends at Level Level. https://buff.ly/49M8ROj

For a lot of people, working on website accessibility feels like this huge overwhelming project – with no clear starting places or ending markers. Some stuff is easy -- like checking color contrast between fonts and backgrounds. Other stuff gets complicated really quickly -- like modifying output of plugins. There may be new skills that team members need to learn -- like how to test with a screen reader. The overwhelming "bigness" keeps a lot of people from even starting. My best advice: stop thinking about accessibility as one big project. It's never going to be one big project, just like "building a website" always involves ongoing improvements and maintenance. No site is ever 100% accessible to 100% of people with disabilities. Stop letting that someday mythical perfection keep you from getting started now. Instead, think about accessibility in terms of "continuous improvement". CI/CD is in fashion now for dev teams. Use that as the model for accessibility. Figure out how to create a regular program or habit of accessibility testing & fixes that breaks things down into small, bite-sized chunks. Start small: fix the color contrast this month, next month work on alt text. Get devs, designers & content folks trained so they don't keep introducing new accessibility barriers. Do what you can DIY and then reach out for help from accessibility experts. If you take this approach, document everything. Evidence that you are paying attention to accessibility and making a good-faith effort -- even if it's slow -- will be better than not doing anything at all. Especially if doing nothing at all is continuing to add to the overall number of issues your future self must fix! Let me be clear: I am not suggesting that you intentionally slow walk accessibility. Real users with disabilities are frustrated and blocked every day by the accessibility barriers they encounter and they deserve better. But if your options are doing nothing vs. getting your organization to start moving with small incremental progress – let's take that small incremental progress every time.

If your audience demographic is over 50, you ought to be paying attention to accessibility. This post has some tips – and while they are applicable to older adults, implementing them will actually help EVERYONE have a better user experience on your website. https://buff.ly/42Mcv7u (Alt: A Guide To Designing For Older Adults — Smashing Magazine. UX, Accessibility, Guides, Design Patterns. Written by Vitaly Friedman.)

I have a 1250+ day streak on Duolingo with Spanish, and I’m still nowhere near fluent. No one is really fluent in a new foreign language in a month or maybe even a year. There are lots of things in life where results build up over time. It takes incremental improvement, regularly practiced over time to get better. SEO is like this. Accessibility is also like this – it's never really a mad race to check off a box once and for all. You might think that at the start, but once you realize that any change to code, content or design can introduce new barriers, you recognize that it’s something you’ll have to keep paying attention to. You’ll need to keep educating and holding accountable relevant team members, AND keep testing and fixing – hopefully with vastly less effort over time because you’ve done the heavy lifting earlier. This might SOUND overwhelming, but when you break it down into small, incremental steps over time, it becomes a lot easier. Regular small steps make this do-able, and you gradually become more fluent with accessibility, just like when you learn a new language. Accessibility is something that is improved and maintained over time – maintained, not attained.

Web developer/agency folks: Do you work with clients in healthcare? There is a new upcoming deadline for improving accessibility in healthcare that will impact many entities in this sector. In May 2024, the US Department of Health & Human Services released a final rule on "Nondiscrimination in Health Programs and Activities" (link in the comments), which covers a wide variety of ways to reduce discrimination in healthcare. Included among the new rule requirements is that all healthcare entities that receive any federal funds, including Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements, must conform to WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines by: May 10, 2026 for organizations with 15 or more employees. May 10, 2027 for organizations with less than 15 employees. This will include any healthcare provider, hospital, surgery center, some dentists or oral surgeons who receive Medicare or Medicaid reimbursements. This would be the vast majority of medical practices. It also includes Medicare supplemental insurance plans, including prescription medicine plans (Medicare Part C and Medicare Part D), insurers who participate in Affordable Care Act Marketplaces, and many social services organizations. The number of organizations that will be required to comply is quite large, and many of them (like local physician practices) may not be looped in to web accessibility compliance requirements. They do deal with a wide variety of other compliance requirements, but web accessibility may not be on their radar. While there are these new compliance requirements that may finally motivate some entities in this sector to address web accessibility, I would stress that improving web accessibility for people with disabilities will help EVERYONE have a better user experience on their website, including older adults who may not be diagnosed or identify as having a disability. Happy to chat if someone needs advice about how to approach this with clients or strategy for addressing the compliance requirement over time to help the client spread out the costs.