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DO IT FOR MORE THAN AVOIDING LAWSUITS

GROUPS DEPENDING�ON WEB ACCESSIBILITY

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GROUPS DEPENDING�ON WEB ACCESSIBILITY

Visually impaired
Motor skill difficulty
Hard of hearing
Learning, developmental, and cognitive disabilities

Everyone can benefit from a more accessible internet

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STORIES OF ACCESSIBILITY USERS

Lee, online shopper with color blindness
Alex, reporter with repetitive stress injury
Martine, online student who is hard of hearing
Ilya, senior staff member who is blind
Preety, a student with ADHD and dyslexia
Yun, retiree with low vision, hand tremor, and mild short-term memory loss
Luis, supermarket assistant with Down syndrome

Accessibility User Stories

Lee, online shopper with color blindness

Encounters barriers when shopping online. �Has one of the most common visual disabilities that affect men: red and green color blindness. �Lee frequently shops online and sometimes encounters problems on websites and with apps where the color contrast of text and images is not adequate and where color alone is used to indicate required fields and sale prices. �When red and green color combinations are used, Lee cannot distinguish between the two, since both look brown to him.

Lee has better experiences with online content and apps that use adequate contrast and allow him to adjust contrast settings in his browser.

He is also better able to recognize when information is required when asterisks are used.

Lee can more easily identify the products he would like to purchase, especially clothing, when the color label names are included in the selection options rather than color swatches alone.

Alex, reporter with repetitive stress injury

Alex has worked as a reporter for more than 20 years and has developed a repetitive strain injury that makes it painful to use a mouse and to type for extended periods of time.

Though it took considerable research, time, and commitment to learn, he is able to work with less pain using the following modifications to his work environment:

- use of an ergonomic keyboard

- use of keyboard commands without a mouse

- voice recognition software on his computer and mobile phone

- assistive touch on his mobile phone

Alex encounters problems when websites and other online content cannot be navigated by keyboard commands alone. He frequently encounters web forms that do not have keyboard equivalents.

Sometimes it is also difficult to skip content and navigate to sections on a webpage without using many keyboard commands, which is very tiring and limits the time he can spend working comfortably.

Martine, online student who is hard of hearing

Martine is 62 years old and has been hard of hearing since birth. She can hear some sounds, but not enough to understand speech. As a child she learned sign language and during her early school years learned written language. She is currently a student again, taking online college courses.

The university she attends provides sign language interpreters and Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) writers who provide written verbatim text interpreting of spoken language for her courses. However, Martine has encountered barriers when video and other media content are not captioned. The university became aware of the need and requirement to provide captioned media and transcripts for audio content and is now working with a captioning provider to caption all content posted on university websites, including all course content in learning management systems.

In addition to providing access for students who are deaf or hard of hearing, the university has found that the use of captions and transcripts has added benefits.

- Students that are not hard of hearing to follow and review content

- Easier to translate content captions into other languages

- Allows for better indexing for searchability

Ilya, senior staff member who is blind

Ilya is blind. She is the chief accountant at an insurance company that uses web-based documents and forms over a corporate intranet and like many other blind computer users, she does not read Braille.

Ilya uses a screen reader and mobile phone to access the web. When accessing web content, the screen reader indicates aloud the structural information on a webpage such as headings, column and row headers in tables, list items, links, form controls, and more - this enables her to better navigate the page, complete and submit forms, and access information in an effective manner.

Ilya encounters problems when websites are not properly coded and do not include alt text descriptions on images. These sites are unnavigable and require large amounts of time to read text from the top of the page to the bottom without navigation cues. Occasionally she finds herself trapped in areas on a webpage unable to move to another area and must abandon the page altogether.

Preety, middle school student with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and dyslexia

Although she has substantial difficulty reading, she particularly enjoys her literature class.

Preety’s school recently started using online digital textbooks. Preety was initially worried about using this new format, but with the use of text-to-speech software that highlights the text on the screen as it reads it aloud, she has found that she can focus on the content more easily instead of struggling over every word.

The text-to-speech software is also helpful with other online text; however, Preety’s experience with websites varies greatly from one site to another. Some sites use graphics and illustrations in a way that helps her to focus on the sections and content that she would like to read, while other sites have a lot of advertisements and moving content that is very distracting.

She also experiences problems with online content when the navigation is not clearly evident. She finds websites and apps that provide multiple means of navigation such as a navigation bar, search box, bread-crumb trails, and a sitemap to be much easier to use.

Yun, retiree with low vision, hand tremor, and mild short-term memory loss

Yun is an 85 year-old with reduced vision, hand-tremor, and mild memory loss; common age-related impairments for someone his age. Yun regularly browses the web reading news sites. In recent years he also started using social media to stay in touch with his family and friends. He maintains his own blog where he posts articles on art history and other topics he enjoys.

Like many older individuals, Yun has difficulty reading small text and clicking on small links and form elements. His daughter showed him how to enlarge text in the web browser, which works well on many websites.

He encounters problems when text does not reflow when it is enlarged and he is forced to scroll back and forth to read the enlarged content, which means he easily loses track of his place.

He also has problems with CAPTCHA images found on many social media sites. The text is so distorted, even when he enlarges it, that he often cannot accurately enter the text. He has a better experience on sites that use alternative CAPTCHA options, unfortunately only a small number currently do.

Luis, supermarket assistant with Down syndrome

Luis has Down syndrome and has difficulty with abstract concepts, reading, and math calculations.

Luis works at a market, bagging groceries for customers. Typically he buys his groceries at the same market where he works, but he is sometimes confused by the large number of product choices and sometimes has problems finding his favorite items when the store layout is changed.

Recently, a friend showed him an app for online grocery purchases that has consistent, easy-to-use navigation with clear and direct instructions. Luis is able to add the list of his most frequently purchased items into the app and save it for additional purchases. He also likes the search functionality that makes suggestions for mistyped or misspelled words. The app also keeps a running total of the items in his virtual shopping cart which helps him keep up with how much he is spending.

Kaseem, teenager who is deaf and blind

Kaseem is a teenager who is deaf and recently became legally blind too, which means she can see only small portions of a screen and read text when it is significantly enlarged.

Kaseem uses:

- screen magnification software to enlarge the text on websites to a suitable font size;

- screen reader software that displays text on a refreshable Braille device;

- large computer screen with high resolution and high luminosity (brightness).

Kaseem’s portable electronic Braille notetaker includes a calendar, e-mail, web browsing, and note-taking functionality. Her mobile device includes GPS which helps her orient herself and navigate around the city.

Kaseem uses the public transportation online site to plan her trips and view bus schedules, but encounters problems when she enlarges the text and it does not reflow or wrap properly, making the maps very difficult to use.

She has a better experience viewing the train schedules that are properly marked up and allow text reflow.

Kaseem found the web team contact information listed at the public transportation website and sent a message to the team informing them of the problems she encountered using their site. She also sent them the link to the train website and described how that site works better for her. She recently received an email message thanking her for her information and informing her that the public transportation web team plans to implement accessibility improvements in the launch of their new website.

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WHO DECIDES WHAT IS ACCESSIBLE?

A WORKING GROUP OF COURSE!

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WEB CONTENT ACCESSIBILITY GUIDELINES (WCAG 2.1)

Published in 2018 by WCAG Working Group as part of W3C WAI (World Wide Web Consortium Web Accessibility Initiative)
Has a total of 78 criteria under 13 guidelines

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WCAG 2.1 �POUR PRINCIPLES

Perceivable
Operable
Understandable
Robust

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POUR PRINCIPLES

Difference Between A, AA, and AAA from WCAG 2.1

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SECTION 508 OF REHABILITATION ACT

1986 Amendment to Rehabilitation Act of 1973, updated in 2017
Targeting websites developed or used by the federal government

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WCAG VS SECTION 508

Which standard should you follow?
Start with WCAG 2.1 AA
A is bare minimum
AAA is sometimes unachievable
If you meet WCAG 2.1 AA, you meet Section 508 👌

Pluralsight Course on Accessibility WCAG 2.1

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TOOLS TO CHECK FOR ACCESSIBILITY

CI/CD Tools

Third party audits 🎊

In browser extensions

Axe
Wave

Screen Readers

VoiceOver (MacOS)
NVDA and JAWS (Windows)