Building the inclusive web

More than 280 million visually impaired internet users have difficulty accessing online content that is published without thinking beyond the graphical interface. That’s why we made our mission to improve accessibility on our websites, test them for accessibility compliance and educate our clients about the web accessibility best practices.

Now, testing websites for accessibility and learning what needs to be fixed is only the first step. The second step is prioritizing and assigning roles and responsibilities. Accessibility tasks can be roughly split into two categories:

Building accessible system, including the design, code and interaction patterns. This is responsibility of designers, developers and webmasters. Creating accessible content, including alternate formats for video and graphical content, the use of semantically appropriate markup. This is responsibility of the website editors, content authors, media mangers and translators.

Lastly, some features and requirements such as a proper color contrast ratio or interactive link states are easy to meet or remedy. Others like transcripts for video content or translation to different languages require a much more intense effort. In both cases, the easiest way to start is by simply testing if the website meets accessibility standards and creating a list of improvements.