Simply put, digital accessibility is an inclusion based design practice focused on ensuring everyone has access to content and services across the internet.
People have differing needs, and in the ever expanding digital world it is important to reduce as many barriers as possible, including: physical, situational, and socio-economic barriers.
What Is Accessibility In The First Place?
Generally, accessibility refers to the practice of creating products, services, or environments that are usable for people of all manner of different abilities and access. Perhaps the most familiar examples of accessible design in daily life are entrance ramps and elevators. If a building just has stairs, people using wheelchairs can’t access it at all, and even people using crutches, or who have unsteady balance due to age or medical conditions, may struggle.
While this is just one rather obvious example of addressing differing physical abilities in architecture, accessibility really extends far beyond just the physical needs. Good accessible designs account for disabilities, situational barriers, socio-economic challenges, and more.
Types of Disabilities
While there are, of course, many more types, accessibility typically seeks to address these general disability categories:
- Physical Disabilities – Refers to limitations on physical abilities, including mobility, dexterity, stamina, and more. Things like missing limbs, arthritis, paralysis, limited muscle control, etc., are examples of physical disabilities. While these are often more visible, it is important to not make assumptions about someone’s abilities based on looks alone.
- Visual Disabilities – Anything affecting eyesight, including partial or complete loss of vision, color blindness, and sensitivity to brightness or even certain colors.
- Cognitive, Learning, & Neurological Disabilities/Disorders – These include various disabilities and disorders that affect the brain and intellectual functions, including neurological, behavioral, and mental health disorders. While there is often overlap between these categories, they are not exactly the same.
And while I do my best to do research and use correct and respectful terminology, I am not a medical professional – if I have made a mistake please let me know and I will correct it. Some common examples of disabilities and disorders that impact accessibility include: learning disabilities like dyslexia, developmental disorders like ADHD and autism spectrum disorder, and intellectual disabilities like Down Syndrome. - Auditory Disabilities – Hearing impairment, whether mild or severe.
- Speech Disabilities – Difficulty producing, or the inability to produce, recognizable speech, whether this is partial like stuttering or more complete like muteness.
Situational Barriers
Unlike more permanent disabilities like visual impairment, hearing loss, or mobility limitations, situational barriers are just that: situational. Situational barriers, or situational disabilities, are temporary results of circumstance: a broken arm, a loud environment, a glaring reflection from the sun, etc. Even though these barriers are removed when the situation is, they still pose real problems during real life use cases, and therefore need to be addressed during design stages.
Socio-Economic Barriers
Socio-economic conditions are one of the most important, yet often overlooked, components of accessibility, and refers to one’s income, wealth, and education. You could be the most able bodied and healthy person, but if you don’t have the money to access programs, or the education to understand the services, then they aren’t really accessible are they?
How Does This Apply To Accessibility On The Web?
Everyone is capable of different things and faces different limitations, but the internet is one thing that everyone can access – at least in theory. The last few decades have seen major explosions in tech growth and adoption, which is absolutely amazing in so many ways! We just need to remember that not everyone experiences the web the same way, and most people aren’t designing with these accessibility limitations in mind.
Digital accessibility issues can range from having just a very minor impact (like not being able to make out the colors in a decorative background image), to extremely significant ones (like not being able to access your online banking information).
It is important to keep accessibility in mind during all stages of the design, building, and testing phases. You realistically can’t account for every possible disability or scenario out there, so what matters is that you are adhering to digital accessibility best practices, and doing the best you can. If you don’t even know where to start, or are still wondering “what is digital accessibility?”, contact me for accessibility services, consultations, or audits. Here are just a few examples of what designing for accessibility needs can look like.
Designing For Physical Disabilities
For numerous reasons, people can have issues navigating websites with a mouse – maybe they only have one hand, maybe they have limited motor control, or maybe it even overlaps with a visual impairment.
One major component of designing for physical limitations is ensuring websites and services are keyboard accessible. This means that someone should be able to navigate your entire website (links, buttons, forms, and all) using just their keyboard (typically by pressing tab to move to the next element, shift+tab to go back to the previous element, and enter to select the current element). This is a crucial part of accessible web design that is often overlooked and can render your website completely useless for so many people.
Designing For Visual Disabilities
The previous tip about ensuring your website is navigable by a keyboard alone is also a major one for visual disabilities too. People who can’t see very well (or at all) will often use screen reading software to read websites to them, as they navigate using the keyboard to hop between important elements.
Designing for screen readers alone is a massive undertaking for web designers, and includes: using proper semantic HTML so screen readers know what type of content is on a page, ensuring content is keyboard navigable and focusable, and ensuring alt text is added to images and visual elements.
For people with milder visual impairments, like color blindness or partial vision loss, ensuring proper color contrasts are used (typically a minimum ratio of 4.5:1) is vital for making sure people can discern between background and foreground elements (gray text on a white background, or a yellow link on an orange button, are impossible for many people to see, as a couple examples).
Another major part of accessibility for different visual needs, is ensuring you have a responsive website that doesn’t break when users need to resize it, or swap out text for a dyslexic friendly font (which you should have used in the first place).
Designing For Cognitive, Learning, & Neurological Disabilities
A surprising fact for many people, is that 48% of Canadian Adults have literacy skills below a high school level, and 17% are at the lowest reading level. This means that writing things in plain language (typically an 8th grade reading level) is actually the best way to go.
Unless you are talking to a specific audience, keep content short and simple to make it accessible to more people. A great example is legal text: so much legal text is written at a much higher reading level that it actually can make it hard for the average citizen to understand their rights or how to get help when needed.
This extends to marketing too: if most Canadians can’t understand your message, they won’t buy your product or service.
Designing For Auditory Disabilities
For most text based websites, hearing impairments really won’t present much of a problem. It becomes an issue when you use video or audio content, at which point you need to ensure you have proper closed captions set up (don’t just rely on automated captions). Even with screen readers, you need to make sure content is written in logical and plain language to make sure it can be understood when read to someone.
Designing For Speech Disabilities
The often underlooked impact of speech impairments is on contact methods. If your website’s only contact method is a phone number, you’re creating an unnecessary barrier for anyone with a speech disability. Consider having multiple contact methods (emails, phone numbers, and contact forms) available so customers can select the best one for them.
Designing For Situational Barriers
Parents holding their child in one arm, someone with a broken arm, or a hoarse voice, still need access to their bank, and still like to buy things online. Same with someone out on a noisy street, or in an office where the sun glares just wrong on their screen.
Don’t lose a potential customer just because of a situational issue. Luckily, most situational barriers can be addressed by designing for all the other accessibility needs – but remember to keep your target audience in mind and continually ask questions and test different use cases.
Designing For Socio-Economic Barriers
Where someone lives, and how much money they have, plays a major role in what device they use and how fast their internet is. Having a fast and responsive website isn’t just good for the user experience, it actually determines whether many people can even get to your site in the first place.
Especially if your target audience is disenfranchised, or lives in rural communities, it is crucial to have a lightweight and fast website.
Why Does Digital Accessibility Matter?
As you can clearly see in the examples above, accessibility is extremely important in making sure you maximize your reach and impact with your target audience. Plus it is just a really nice thing to do, and is mandatory in many countries and increasingly so in Canada.
If that wasn’t enough to convince you (or your boss) of the importance of digital accessibility, note that 24% of Canadian adults have at least one disability, and consumers with physical disabilities represent 14% of Canadian consumer spending (up to 21% by 2030). That’s a huge part of the market to simply toss out because your website sucks.