5 Questions About Accessibility

How good is your brand’s accessibility online?

11/30/2016

At 5 by 5 Design we believe it’s possible to change the world by posing the right questions, listening to the honest answers, and following the path that emerges from the dialogue. Today, we’ve tapped into the insights of accessibility expert, Joe Dolson.

Joe is a WordPress plugin developer and web consultant to clients across the globe. He’s authored several popular WordPress plugins, including WP to Twitter and My Calendar, and teaches at LinkedIn Learning on Accessibility for WordPress. Joe writes and speaks regularly on important topics in accessible web development and web standards. We’ve asked him for his take on these questions.

1. What does accessibility have to do with brand experiences?

For people with disabilities, the accessibility of their web sites, apps, and other digital experiences is a fundamental part of the brand’s identify for those users. If your experience with a brand is that its tools are reliably usable for you, then that’s a positive experience. If your experience is that its tools are reliably impossible for you to use, that’s going to shape your impression of that brand, particularly in regards to its social responsibility and compassion for your issues.

2. How can you find out how accessible (or not) your site may be?

There are many machine-assisted tools for getting an overview of the accessibility of your site. To get a full picture, more than just an automated tool is going to be required. However, if you go to http://wave.webaim.org and check your website, you’ll get at least a general idea of the issues your site will be posing for users with disabilities.

3. What matters most when it comes to accessibility and why?

There’s more than one way to define “most,” in this context. First, what issues will affect the most people? Second, what issues will have the greatest impact on the use of the site?

Statistics on web accessibility are very poor, and collection of statistics on these issues is a constant challenge. However, the largest body of users with disabilities is most likely users with low vision. For these users, the greatest problem is going to be font sizes that are too small and an inability to increase the size of the font in their browser without creating display problems.

The most severe problems usually have to do with creating controls that simply can’t be used at all without a mouse and the visual ability to find the control. This may sound improbable, but it’s an incredibly common problem with JavaScript driven tools.

4. What are the basic steps everyone should be taking to improve brand experience through accessibility?

You want every user’s first experience with your brand to be positive, so start at the beginning: what is somebody’s first experience with your brand? How do they discover your brand? If this experience is web based, do all users have an equal experience? Are you conveying important information only in an image? Provide that information in alternative text, as well. Every fix you make helps.

5. What trends do you see in the way of accessibility?

One of the largest trends in accessibility right now is video captioning. With the growth of social media, tablets, and phone usage, the desire to view videos with sound disabled has grown astronomically. This is of great benefit to those users who have no choice but to view videos without sound, but as with many accessibility issues, has received greater notice because many users now desire this option.

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