When it comes to web accessibility standards, the most widely respected set of rules for websites and web applications are those laid out in the Website Accessibility Initiative. The Initiative, drawn up in 1998 by the World Wide Web Consortium, is a list of standards for websites to accommodate hardware and software to ensure equal access to users with disabilities.

That being said, for a lot of websites and web applications, upholding accessibility standards isn’t a requirement so much as it is a smart move. Much like making your website mobile responsive, supporting accessibility standards is a good way to prepare your website for all users.

To start with, let’s talk about the legal ramifications of accessibility standards.

What’s Section 508?

You might not have heard of the Website Accessibility Initiative, but you might have heard the phrase “accessibility compliant,” and, even more intimidating, “508 mandate.” A 508 Mandate is how the U.S. legally enforces accessibility standards.

Section 508 was an amendment made to the U.S. Rehabilitation Act which mandates that all information technology used by the federal government must be accessible to people with disabilities.

A 508 Mandate is limited only to the federal sector and websites receiving federal funds; it doesn’t apply to the private sector. If you are a privately owned business, you are not legally required to be 508 compliant.

For the private business owner, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll be receiving a 508 Mandate any time soon. That being said, making your website 508 compliant is easy to implement and another step towards building up your web presence to be as strong as possible.

How do Accessibility Standards Work?

Making your website compliant with accessibility standards means that you configure your website to support assistive technology. The main forms of assistive technology are text-to-speech software, screen readers, and desktop screen magnifiers. This software, and the accessibility compliances on your website, work to support users who need assistance with:

• Visual
• Motor ability
• Auditory
• Seizures
• Cognitive

The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) provides a wide variety of resources to help web developers, designers, and content administrators build their websites while keeping with accessibility standards, including a checklist of items included in their Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The U.S. federal government has modeled Section 508 around the items listed in the W3C Guidelines, and generally, they represent the rules followed by web users universally.

How to Make Your Website Accessibility Compliant

Since the initial release of the 1998 Website Accessibility Initiative, accessibility standards have been updated to meet the modern web experience. Here are a few points that you can easily implement.

• Alt Text: For every non-text element (audio files, images, graphs, GIFs), a textual description - commonly called “Alt text” - should be provided. For users browsing with screen reader technology, this is incredibly helpful. Alt text won’t be displayed on your page, but it will be registered by search engines and screen reader technology. This goes for dynamic content as well, if you have content that changes in response to personalization, the alt text should change to match new elements. For example, shopping suggestions that update in response to a user’s browsing and shopping history should have updated alt text. This becomes slightly more complicated with image carousels and sliders that are so common on sites today - since they have both images and UI to access the images. Be sure to select a carousel library that supports accessibility.

Note: In Drupal, image fields offer the admin the opportunity to write alt text. For more information, visit our guide for configuring images in Drupal.

• Clear Language, Easily Seen and Easily Understood: Try to make language as clear as possible on your website, in both visibility and expression. For example, underlining, increasing the color contrast ratio, and changing the hue, saturation, and brightness of colored text to accommodate users. There are free tools and services that will review your graphic design for accessibility, which can be especially helpful for color-deficient users.
• Stand Alone Web Content: Make sure that your page can still be navigated and read without any scripts or programmed elements running, like Javascript or CSS. Macs have a built-in screen reader (commonly called SRs), which is a great way to test how your page reads. In addition to assistive software, this also prepares your website for users with slower internet connections.
• Use of ARIA tags: ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) tagging is a more recent development and is commonly used in HTML. This allows a developer to add special tags to sections of the page to indicate the type of content or if it should be skipped by assistive technology. This is particularly useful for screen readers, so they can identify primary navigation vs. secondary navigation, or provide “skip tags” for elements that are not important to the page. You can read here for a full list of ARIA elements that you can add to any page template.
• Captions: Provide a textual description of any visual elements in a multimedia presentation. For example, if you embed a slideshow on your website, provide a written description of the images so that users using screen readers can understand. For videos, provide captions or a written dictation of the video’s audio. This has become particularly difficult in the age of big infographics - providing accessible infographics requires some forethought.

Note: You can visit the W3C website for a checklist of success criteria for Web Content Accessibility.

The “If All Else Fails” Rule

The W3C site advises admin that if they can’t configure their page to meet these standards, they can always design a separate page that does and then link it to their original page, maintaining the web design but making information accessible to everyone.

That being said, website management has come a long way since accessibility standards were first drawn up in 1998. In some cases - like with the Drupal CMS—websites provide accessibility options to the admin or have them already built into their system. With recent website management and web browsing developments that support accessibility standards, it’s unusual for admin to have to create a separate page to preserve their web design.

The Benefits To You, The Website Admin

Typically search engines, like Google, that crawl through your website prioritize search ranking based on a lot of the same features as accessibility standards listed above, such as:

• A semantic page structure (If you’re using headers, they follow a tiered h1/h2/h3/p format)
• Descriptive page titles
• Breaking up your content with descriptive headers
• Alt text for any images

Though, as far as we know, web accessibility compliance itself is not a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm—yet.

We call this writing good “semantic” code, meaning code that explicitly communicates what it is and what it’s doing.

Arranging your header formatting in cascading order and structuring your web pages in a way that makes sense achieves accessibility compliance as well as Search Engine Optimization. Like including links to your social media accounts or designing your website to respond to mobile devices, configuring your website to meet accessibility standards is a way of making yourself visible to all internet users. And while it is legally a requirement for some, it is a best practice for all.

If you have any questions regarding accessibility standards that we didn’t cover, or need some guidance on the process please feel free to contact us directly.