What is Web Accessibility
Web accessibility is about allowing disabled and non-disabled people to use your website regardless of the technology (software and hardware) or adaptive strategy they are using.
This is particularly important for people with disabilities who rely heavily on assistive technologies to access the Internet.
It also affects the elderly whose abilities change with age and therefore embraces all disabilities that affect the use of the web such as visual, neurological, auditory, cognitive and speech impairments.
Below is a list of some disabilities:
- Visual impairments (blindness, low vision, colour blindness);
- Physical disabilities (motor disabilities);
- Cognitive and neurological disabilities (dyslexia and dyscalculia, attention deficit disorder, intellectual disabilities, seizure disorders, mental health disabilities, memory impairments);
- Aging-related conditions;
- Multiple disabilities (for example someone who is deaf and blind);
- Hearing disabilities (deafness and hard of hearing).
Different disabilities affect the way disabled users use the web and the types of assistive technologies and adaptive strategies they use. Assistive technologies (also called adaptive software or hardware) and adaptive strategies help users with disabilities carry out tasks on the web that they would otherwise not be able to. These include screen readers, screen magnifiers, text browsers, alternative keyboards, voice browsers, Braille and refreshable Braille, scanning software, speech recognition, tabbing through structural elements (for example links, headers and list items), etc.
Web accessibility, therefore, is about designing and adapting web pages in such a way that disabled people can use the web using these technologies and adaptive strategies. For example, a blind person will use a screen reader that will read aloud what is displayed on the screen. Since most screen readers can only read text and do so from left to right, it is important that web pages are designed in such a way that they can be read in a linear fashion and that all graphical elements are supported with a text alternative (i.e. use of the "Alt" element in the img tag).
