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A look at accessibility short-term fixes, and why you should be looking at more long-term solutions to having an accessible website.
Website accessibility is always a hot topic, and for good reason. While around 15% of the world’s population live with some form of disability, 90% of websites are actually not web accessible.
I’m not going to touch upon the complexities of web accessibility in this article or the various ways that users access and interact with websites. Instead, I’m going to answer a question that might be on many marketer’s minds.
Is There An Accessibility Magic Wand Or Silver Bullet?
The answer to this question is NO. However, there are some ‘accessibility overlays’ that are gaining popularity amongst brands and website owners that could provide a suitable short-term solution.
So the key issue is when websites are built they are often not designed and developed with accessibility in mind, even at the most basic level.
This can be due to lack of knowledge on the client side so they don’t press for it, or on the agency side, certainly in the UK. But the US markets have seen lawsuits against websites for not being accessible, and so US websites are far more likely to be in the know. The UK is slowly coming around, taking note.
Already built websites that fail accessibility should look to implement code and development changes to ensure that their website passes at least the basic level of accessibility standards recommended. For most businesses in the UK, this is WCAG 2.1 A. For public sector organisations and many US companies, it is WCAG 2.1 AA.
But fixing now doesn’t mean that it’s fixed forever. As new pages and content are added to websites this needs to be carefully reviewed over time, and there could be some maintenance to be performed to ensure that accessibility standards continue to be met.
But if the website is built with accessibility in mind the task will be far less daunting.
So I mentioned there’s no silver bullet, but there are Accessibility Overlays. These overlay your website and provide controls for your users to be able to modify the website to make it work for them.
These can be useful as a short-term solution, whilst you work on making your website accessible natively. They shouldn’t be considered as a long-term fix by any means.
See an example from the Seat Cars website. The orange tab below is the website accessibility widget when clicked opens an array of options.
There are many overlay providers springing up, and these tools are appearing on some fairly high-profile brand websites. Each provider boasts how they work better than their competitors as you’d expect.
However, the accessibility community frowns upon them when used as a long-term solution, as they just mask key issues rather than actually solving them.
I can’t talk about overlay tools without naming a few of them. These are the ones that seem to be cropping up time and time again:
The principle of it is that each of these tools charges a subscription but they are just overlays that don’t actually resolve any accessibility issues. Essentially a bandaid. An investment into accessibility might be costly in the short term but not in the long.
Google is looking at accessibility far more and it is appearing in some of their reports. It’s likely only a matter of time before accessible websites are actually ranking better than those that are not. After all, accessibility is just part of a good user experience.
So the key takeaway is to explore the accessibility overlays and see if these could work for your business in the short term if there is a pressing requirement, but they should not be the end game. Budgeting accordingly to explore identifying and resolving key accessibility issues on your website should be the way forward.
When I began making notes for this article in 2022, I had seen far more of these overlays in use. When visiting some of these websites now, I can see that they have since removed them. It’s highly likely that they only planned to use them for a short period while code level accessibility work was carried out on their websites.
So I’ll leave you to explore what option might be best for you. At Impact, we build websites to WCAG 2.1 A as standard, and higher if required.
We can assist you and provide any advice on what your steps need to be if you are looking for code level improvements, so feel free to reach out.
That’s a wrap for Swipe & Deploy #32. Join me next week when I’ll share another insight or piece of inspiration from around the web.
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