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You may have heard of accessibility in the past
or maybe you heard somewhere that your website should be accessible,
but what does that even mean?
The idea of anyone being able to use a website sounds simple enough,
but it's more nuanced than that.
There are lots of people in the world,
and there's many considerations to be made.
In general though,
there is one guiding principle that should make accessibility
a lot easier for anyone to understand.
Web standards and best practices tend to lead towards more accessible websites
and vice versa.
Designing a website to be accessible tends to lead you
towards web standards and best practices.
For example, screen reading software that assists users with visual impairments
can sometimes have difficulty when tables are used for layout
rather than being used for tabular data.
There are many different types of impairments that encompass
vision, hearing, motor skills, and more.
We'll learn about specific techniques to accommodate
all these different types of users.
Before we get into the technical details,
let's back up because sometimes web developers and designers wonder
why they should be so concerned with accessibility in the first place.
There are numerous reasons,
but here are three really important ones.
First and most importantly, it's just the right thing to do.
The web represents a giant leap forward in the quality of life
for people with disabilities.
For example, before the advent of online news and screen readers,
it was difficult, expensive, and oftentimes impossible
for a person with visual impairments to read a daily newspaper.
That alone should be reason enough.
Second, as I mentioned earlier,
building accessible websites has a tendency to lead towards HTML markup
that is semantic and easy for everyone, even computers, to understand and interpret.
Every designer and developer should understand the importance of this.
Lastly, you can get into trouble legally if you're not careful.
Many countries have laws that require government agencies
along with public and private organizations to maintain web content
that is accessible to people of all abilities and disabilities.
In the year 2000, a blind Australian man engaged in a court case
against the Sydney organizing committee of the Olympic Games,
and he won the case because, under the Australian Disability Discrimination Act of 1992,
the official website of the Sydney Olympic Games
failed to provide adequate accessibility to blind users.
Legal disputes of this nature can be extremely costly,
but they're also so easily avoidable by simply providing accessible content.
As we'll learn, it's not as difficult as it might seem.
Whether you're creating a new website or even if you're updating an old one,
you should familiarize yourself with the local and federal laws
that the website will be subjected to.
Here are a few documents to help you get started.
The World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C for short,
is an organization that sets the rules for HTML, CSS, and many other standards.
A W3C project known as the Web Accessibility Initiative, or WAI,
published the first version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG, in 1999.
Since then and especially in recent years,
it has been accepted as the gold standard for creating accessible websites.
By the end of 2008,
the WCAG 2.0 had been released by the WC3 as a recommendation.
I highly recommend that you take a look at this document and read it over.
It is lengthy,
and we cover quite a bit of the information it contains.
But even so, you should at least look at it for reference.
In 1998, the United States Congress amended The Rehabilitation Act of 1973
to include Section 508 which requires federal agencies
to make electronic information accessible to people with disabilities.
The portions regarding web technology
are based on the guidelines developed by the Web Accessibility Initiative of the W3C,
and this is also the case for laws and regulations around the world.
In the UK, for instance,
the Publicly Available Specification, or PAS 78, published in 2006
also references the WAI guidelines.
This is also true in Canada, Spain, Japan, and many other countries.
But even so, you should study the laws that are local to your country
and strive to comply with them.
Accessibility might seem difficult or confusing right now,
but we'll go through everything one step at a time.
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