Web Accessibility is for Everyone
New-found skills from web accessibility training
When you had your website built, did you think about making it accessible? I didn’t. Other than alt text, I not only didn’t know about web accessibility, I didn’t even know enough to ask questions.
Once I realized how little I knew, I also realized that I would need help. After all, big companies have entire teams to manage this for them (ideally), I was just a solo person trying to figure it all out. Which is why I needed a course to teach me more, to round out my skills.
What I learned from taking a web accessibility course
One thing that I learned is that it’s OK if you didn’t know this before! All of the information about web accessibility is learnable with time and effort.
I also learned that many of us will need some aspect of web accessibility in our lifetimes due to aging, illness/surgical recovery, or needing captions on a video when we can’t play said video at full volume. Like if, I don’t know, you want to watch a funny video on True Facts About Owls while you are at work and you don’t want anyone to hear your video and think that you aren’t working. It could happen. I don’t judge.
How does web accessibility help your business?
You’ll be able to offer your products to more people. In the United States alone, roughly 26% of people have a disability, and many of those disabilities affect how people interact with the internet.
Understanding how web accessibility affects your customers and visitors deepens your empathy to all of your potential customers. Deeper empathy means better relationships with your consumers.
A website that is accessible to everyone is a website that is shoppable by everyone.
Most of all I learned how to approach this as a multi-layered and iterative process. I’ll be adding a lot of what I learned to my own website checklists and to my client’s checklists, but here’s a start for you:
A short checklist for when you update your website with new products
When you upload products to your site, make it a part of your process to always use these guidelines to add the alt text.
Make your hyperlinks better by making your chosen words more actionable and clear - you want to make it clear what information your visitors are clicking through too. A sentence that is not full of action words won’t encourage the reader to go to the link, and anything nondescript won’t help a person using a screen reader.
Example (these are examples and not actual links): Get ready to start profiting on your business plan with this guide is a better statement than click here to learn more about profit in your business.
Do you have brand guidelines in place? Like “This is what color, shape and text stylings to use for all of your buttons” ”this is what color your hyperlinks will be” “these are your fonts”. Chances are, if you worked with a web designer or graphic designer, they may have laid out the brand guidelines for you. If you aren’t sure that they were optimized for web accessibility - ask them!
If your currently rely only on the use of a different color for your text links, try adding a second way to identify links, like an underline. Just be sure that if you use the color and the underline for your text links that you aren’t using the same color and styling combo anywhere else for text that is not a link.
Why not just use color? Because many forms of colorblindness would prevent visitors to your website from distinguishing between two different colors and it won’t look like a link.Avoid using those accessibility plug ins as a fix. They aren’t a real solution and disability rights advocates and accessibility experts agree that many of them are either useless or in bad cases, actively harmful to the communities that they claim to help.
How to get your web platforms on board with accessibility
Something else I learned - a lot of our common eCommerce platforms - Shopify, Squarespace, Wix and even Wordpress offer a lot of built-in accessibility features, we just have to know where to find them and how to implement them.
They aren’t perfect! For instance, I use Squarespace. It has a lot of features built in - a place to put alt text on each image, lots of good text features and it is mostly optimized behind the scenes for accessibility.
But even with all of those options, I still find that their designs and themes don’t always offer the full range of options for me to make everything accessible unless I insert some special coding. Thing is? I think that’s their job to code it, not mine.
How to bother your eCommerce platform to increase accessibility
So what do I do? Hound them until this changes. I call this the squeaky wheel technique where I send them a message and then if it hasn’t resolved or updated in a few months, I send them another one.
In my opinion, big companies with lots of talented and knowledgeable employees should be able to make all of their platforms default to being the most accessible that they can be. So many of us indie business owners are doing the work on shoestring budgets and with lean resources. The big companies can and should do better and I call on them to do so.
Web accessibility is here for all of us, to enhance all of our experiences on the internet. Even if you hadn’t thought about it before, you and your business will benefit from implementing even a few changes.
Where and how to contact your eCommerce platform
Hint - you might need to be logged into your account on these platforms in order to get your message through.
Get past the help forums and go straight to the Squarespace comment form
Shopify might also try to lead you through a support forum, so go straight to their contact form
Get started with the Wix comment form
You will definitely need to be logged into your WordPress account to contact their support teams.
Join me in being a squeaky wheel!
What questions do you have? Drop them in the comments below!
Edit: the image that I used on my main blog page is of the “word” a11y in hot pink. This is a shorthand for accessibility and is something called a numeronym. In this case, the number 11 in the middle refers to the number of letters in the word accessibility that fall in between the ‘a’ and the ‘y’.
