According to the World Health Organization, approximately 1.3 billion people (about 16% of the global population) live with some form of disability. Unfortunately, inaccessible technologies and websites cause many people to face barriers that can slow them down, cause frustration, and prevent them from completing their tasks and reaching their goals.
By embracing accessibility, we ensure that people with visual, auditory, motor and cognitive impairments can enjoy the same experiences and level of engagement as those without these challenges. Accessibility is not just a legal requirement — it’s an essential part of building an inclusive web and connected world.
Conformance to standards like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is critical for creating accessible designs that work with indispensable tools that many users rely on. Standards help ensure that web content is perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust for a wide range of users (as described by the four principles of the WCAG).
At SiteCrafting, we incorporate accessibility into our design process and bring together multiple approaches to accessibility testing, including manual keyboard navigation, HTML markup scanners, and detailed testing with screen-reading tools to deliver the best user experience for everyone.
Accessibility Helps Everyone
When approaching accessibility purely from a compliance angle, it’s easy to get stuck and hyper-focused, checking off a long list of boxes to meet legal and technical requirements, and, in the process, not recognizing the positive impacts accessibility can have on everyone.
Accessible websites and other experiences are intuitive and easy to navigate and use for everyone. For instance, ensuring sufficient color contrast (covered by WCAG 2.2 Success Criterion 1.4.3) doesn’t just help users with visual impairments — it makes content clearer for everyone across multiple situations. To illustrate this example, if you have your screen brightness turned down to save battery, a website with sufficient contrast between the text and the background can close the gap between legible text and a dead battery.
As another example, the criteria under WCAG Guideline 3.3 on Input Assistance that describe clear error messages and making it easier for users to re-enter information help users more easily fill out forms and prevent and recover from mistakes. Error Recovery also happens to be a foundational heuristic in great user experience design, as one of Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design.
Accessibility Connects People
Another aspect of accessibility that often goes unnoticed is the role it plays in creating trust and connection with users. When a website works well for people with disabilities, it sends a message that the organization values all users, fostering a sense of belonging and trust.
Accessibility means making something that is equally easy to use and understand for everyone. When we make something easier to see, hear, touch, feel, and understand, it’s better for everyone, and it might just help bring us all together in the process.
At SiteCrafting, we incorporate accessibility not only to ensure ADA compliance but also to enhance user experience for everyone.
Resources
Here are just a few resources from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which develops international standards for the web:
