How to Get Ahead and Keep Up with Website Accessibility Standards
Website accessibility is a critical goal for businesses with a digital ecosystem. Yet, it remains difficult for most businesses to achieve. There are excellent business reasons to ensure excellent website accessibility and achieve Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) level AA conformance.
Understand Levels of Conformance
WCAG 1.0 was originally released in May 1999. Version 2.0 started being worked on in 2001 and was published in 2008, but was not officially accepted as ISO standard until 2012. And our current version is WCAG 2.2, which was adopted in October 2023. This updated version includes additional criteria and new sections on privacy and security.
Within WCAG, compliance is categorized into three levels: A, AA, and AAA. Level A is the lowest level of compliance and only covers basic accessibility features. If a website only meets level A compliance, it is still not considered usable by most people with disabilities. Level AA is fairly universally accepted as the level for most websites to comply with. Websites who achieve a level AA compliance are usable for the majority of people with or without disabilities. Level AAA is the highest level of compliance, ensuring that the website is accessible to the maximum number of users and is not just accessible but very easy to use.
Why isn’t level AAA the accepted level of compliance? Even W3C—the organization responsible for developing and maintaining the standards—say that it is very, very difficult (sometimes virtually impossible) to be fully compliant with level AAA. Businesses can choose which areas of level AAA they can and want to comply with, without having to achieve every AAA requirement. Additionally, a business can vet compelling reasons to achieve AAA compliance. For example, a website that specifically caters to people with disabilities, might need to be significantly more critical and get as close to level AAA compliance as possible.
For most businesses, level AA should be their goal (with any tailored AAA standards they deem important or easy to achieve).
Use Available Resources
There is no need to reinvent the wheel. There are a substantial amount of resources available to help organizations with website accessibility. WCAG documents are easily available at W3C’s website. They also provide awesome guides, free courses, and tools. WCAG.com breaks down the standards depending on your role. 18F Accessibility also has a very good guide. There are free evaluations, checklists, courses, and about as many tools as you can think of available from multiple organizations. Many organizations are trying to limit the barriers and fund resources to achieve more universal website accessibility.
Effectively Communicate the Importance and Get Business Stakeholders on Board
As with many things in the digital world, for projects to be truly successful, you must achieve full support with all major players at the company. Make a business case, make it strategic, and prioritize communicating it. Our recommendations for a good business case:
Focus on the positive and benefits. Avoid relying on scare tactics or shaming.
Emphasize the ROI and provide real evidence—use a current accessibility scan of your website, use benchmark data of industry standards, show studies on improved UX and website performance post accessibility improvements.
Educate appropriately, make sure the idea of accessibility is easy to understand and give concrete examples.
During communication understand any concerns
Start with Development Early – the Sooner, the Better
Retrofitting an existing website can be longer, more expensive, and more prone to complications. So, tying accessibility improvements into a website upgrade, migration, or when creating a brand-new website (or application) is ideal. During the development process, accessibility architecture conversations should happen early. Bring everybody into these early conversations: developers, designers, marketers, content writers and authors, solution architects—multiple people are integral to achieving website accessibility.
However, don’t put off website accessibility improvements because you might be doing a migration in 5 years. Plan strategically and see what streamlines are appropriate for your organization.
Ensure an Ongoing Process and Make Smart Use of Good Tools
Website accessibility is not a one and done project. Compliance rules are updated; major changes don’t happen frequently, but it’s important to keep up with them. Websites do change frequently, and just because your website met level AA compliance once doesn’t mean it stayed that way. In fact, if you aren’t watching it… it is unlikely it did. The easiest way to handle this is by using a website accessibility checker, which monitors your website. There are free checkers available, but the easiest and most powerful to use do cost money. Some tools tie to other business needs such as a tool that monitors for any website errors alongside accessibility issues, which can be useful and effective.
Adoption, Process, and Ownership Considerations
While having an accessibility specialist on your team or hiring an agency specialist can be a really effective and straightforward way to ensure excellent and ongoing website accessibility compliance, there are other considerations. You might consider a formal change adoption plan or tie website accessibility management to an existing effective process.
IT teams tend to bear the responsibility of website accessibility at many organizations, but great accessibility means significantly more teams need to be involved. Since website accessibility spans multiple departments, we also recommend defining ownership roles and responsibilities as well as cross-team collaboration strategies. This will help lead to better accessibility, ongoing success, and a better culture of accessibility overall.
Not sure where to get started? Cimarron Winter can help. We’re passionate about website accessibility and can help organizations audit their website, consider solution architecture needs, and build overall website accessibility strategies.