A few weeks ago a colleague broke her ankle in two places and had to have surgery. I didn’t speak to her for at least a few weeks after the incident so when I asked her how things had been, it was interesting when she responded “It’s been fun discovering how inaccessible it is getting around on public transport”.
It’s easy for us abled people to imagine that disabled people are other than us. And that creating a world and internet that is accessible is some second-order problem. However, if you are 'abled' know that everyone is an accident, an illness or an age away from being disabled.
Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) so I've compiled 15 small(ish) changes you could make to start caring about more accessibility.
But first, what's accessibility?
My favourite definition of Accessibility is:
When people, regardless of ability or disability, can access the same information and function – Sharron Rush (Knowibility).
For the context of this article, we also need to remember Accessibility is a standard. There are two popular standards to evaluate your digital products against - The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and Section 508 of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
What gets in the way of making things accessible?
Most people have one or two objections to getting started.
- You don’t think you can make any impact without carving out the time and/or budget to run an accessibility project. This is a myth. As with climate change, if everyone made small and consistent changes, we would move more quickly towards a more accessible internet.
- You don’t know what to do. Here’s where this article will help you. If you take some of the steps I share here, I guarantee you’ll create a more accessible experience for disabled people.
15 things you can do to make the (digital) world more accessible
Educate yourself
Everything starts with a bit of learning. If you want to get to grips with the basics
- Read about accessibility. Knowing about how people with disabilities are systemically excluded is your starting place. The WCAG website will give you a more thorough introduction to accessibility.
- Read more about first-person stories of disability in Alice Wong’s Disability Visibility Project.
- Watch some videos on accessibility. I gave a talk on accessibility a few years ago at the AIGA design conference.
- Follow disabled people on social media. There’s no better way to know more about the experiences of navigating an inaccessible world than to learn directly from disabled people. I follow Liz Jackson (@elizejackson on Twitter) and Alice Wong, and other non-public figures.
- Try out a few things to see what life is like for disabled people (please note that whilst this gives you a small insight, it is no replacement for actually hiring or engaging with disabled people). I frequently design with accessibility features (voice-over or the greyscale filter) turned on. You could navigate through your favourite website without using a mouse. Some extensions that you can install to learn more include the Web disability simulator and Funkify.
Create more accessible content
If you’re posting on social media or writing content including presentations that you share with clients and colleagues, you can make an impact.
- Ensure links are always underlined. When you have links in a document that are only distinguished by colour, people who can’t see all colours might miss them. Also, make sure that links describe what they do. So instead of “click here”, try “read the WACAG guidelines”.
- Think about the contrast of whatever you post. Avoid text on images unless you can control the colours of the text and images completely. Use dark text on a light background and light text on a dark background. Get familiar with contrast checkers and use them. Two of my favourites are from WebAim and Accessible web.
- Add alt text when you post an image. Blind people and people with vision impairments might experience your content using a screen reader. The alt text describes images for them so this small change can make a huge difference to someone’s experience. Here’s a handy guide on how to write alt text.
- Add captions to your videos. Popular meeting tools like Google Meet and Zoom, YouTube, and social media platforms like Instagram allow you to add automatic captions to your videos.
- Write for a 9-year-old when targeting a broad audience. People with cognitive impairments need easy-to-understand writing. You can use tools like Juicy Studio to learn more about Readability and the Hemingway Editor to check your writing.
- Ensure that people can start and stop any moving elements e.g. videos or animations in your content. Autoplaying videos can be alarming and distracting for neurodivergent people e.g. those with ADHD.
Assess your website accessibility
You don’t know what you don’t know. Here are ways to discover how accessible your websites and web applications are.
- Manual accessibility checks. The WCAG website offers a list of easy checks to run yourself. Elseviers accessibility checklist is my favourite tool for manual checks as it splits out the requirements by level and roles, has guidance and references both the WCAG and Section 508 standards.
- Automated web checks. There are several tools for assessing accessibility automatically. My favourites are Google’s Lighthouse tool within Chrome for simplicity and the Wave web accessibility evaluation tool (for visible articulation of errors). The WCAG website also offers a comprehensive list of tools to find your favourites.
- Automated deployment checks. If you build websites and want to bake accessibility testing into your deployment process then you should try Pa11y via the Pa11y website or Github.
- Get disabled people to use your websites. My favourite disability testing company is Fable. But you can go one step better if you’re in a hiring position and increase the number of disabled people/people with disabilities in your team. I’ve learnt unexpected things from working closely with a blind colleague and involving disabled people in my usability testing.
Going deeper
If you’re interested in learning more practical ways to create (more) accessible websites, I have a course on LinkedIn Learning that dives into that.
If you're interested in one of my live accessibility sessions, let me know so I can let you know when I run the next one.
PS: Ironically, LinkedIn won't let me underline my links. Hopefully, the bold text is distinctive enough. The numbering also wouldn't run sequentially across sections.
