Web Accessibility
Web accessibility (a11y) is the practice of designing and building websites that can be used by everyone, including people with disabilities such as visual, hearing, motor, and cognitive impairments.
Web accessibility ensures that websites and applications work for the widest possible audience, including the estimated 1.3 billion people worldwide who experience significant disability.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are the international standard for web accessibility.
In practice
- A retailer faced an ADA lawsuit over their inaccessible website, costing $100,000 in legal fees, fixing accessibility issues cost a fraction of that
- A government website improved their WCAG compliance from AA to AAA and saw a 20% increase in form completions from all users, not just those with disabilities
- A SaaS company added proper keyboard navigation and ARIA labels to their dashboard, enabling a blind user (who happened to be a Fortune 500 VP) to adopt their product
- A media company added closed captions to all video content and discovered that 80% of caption users were not deaf, they were watching in environments where they couldn't use sound
More in Web development
- Responsive Design
- Progressive Web App (PWA)
- Single-Page Application (SPA)
- Server-Side Rendering (SSR)
- Static Site Generation (SSG)
- API (Application Programming Interface)
- CMS (Content Management System)
- Headless CMS
- Version Control
- CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment)
- JavaScript Framework
- TypeScript
Not sure how this applies to you?
A senior engineer walks your site, your search presence and the way enquiries reach you, then writes down the three things worth fixing first. You keep the document either way.