Principles of Web Accessibility: Designing A Website For Everyone

What did you do on the internet this week? Our guess is, probably lots: paid your phone bill, booked a flight, bought movie tickets, registered to vote, caught up on the news, researched an important purchase. And that’s just in your personal life. Chances are, you relied on the internet at work too.

Imagine you couldn’t do most, or any, of those things anymore—not because the technology disappeared, but because you were suddenly unable to use it, even while most of the people around you still could. At best, life would be less convenient and more expensive; many tasks would take much longer. At worst, you could be on the wrong side of the digital divide, and at a serious social and economic disadvantage.

That’s reality for many of the 56 million Americans who identify as having a disability. For them, using even the most seemingly basic website can present anything from frustrating challenges to insurmountable obstacles. That’s why the World Wide Web Consortium created the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. They represented an important step in ensuring the power of the web is available to people of all abilities.

For your organization, failing to follow these guidelines could mean alienating users, ultimately losing you customers or donors. And it could even get you sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Read on for our tips on how to make your website welcoming to people of all abilities. We’ve also made this post into a downloadable PDF, so you can also reference it offline. Because you can’t afford to alienate users, or get sued. More than that, it’s the right thing to do.

The ADA is a civil rights legislation signed into law by President George HW Bush on July 26th, 1990 protecting people with disabilities from discrimination – ada.gov

WCAG is a set of technical standards and guidelines written by the World Wide Web Consortium. Although WCAG is not in and of itself a legal document, when a company or organization is sued under the ADA, these guidelines are frequently cited as the standard for digital accessibility.

The most important thing you can do to ensure an inclusive website is to think about accessibility throughout the project: from content strategy to wire-framing to design to development. Accessibility should never be a compliance box to tick, or a requirement to tack on retroactively.

The best websites are created when strategists and designers put themselves in the proverbial shoes of users, anticipating how they will navigate the site to find the information they want and need. As we learned working with The Chicago Lighthouse,  building an accessible website is no different; it simply requires a broadened understanding of what that navigation experience might look, sound and feel like.

Designing for accessibility isn’t hard, and it doesn’t need to be ugly. But if you’re designing with the primary goal of meeting standards, it likely will be. Your goal should always be a website that is enjoyable and usable for everyone.

That being said, here are eleven broad guidelines to keep in mind, based on the WCAG’s four principles of web accessibility, plus some practical accessibility measures you can put to use on your website right now.

We’ve created a handy downloadable PDF version of this post. It should be noted that there are more guidelines not included here; for the original, exhaustive list of guidelines, visit the WCAG website.

Whether you want to assess the accessibility of your current website, are interested in bringing your existing website into compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or are thinking about building a new—and, of course, accessible—website, we’re always here to chat. Drop us a line.