Workshop Offers Intro to Making Websites Accessible
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We expect when we head into a County building there will be ramps, ADA parking and other accessibility features.
The front door for many County services is our website, and it needs to be just as accessible. But it may not be clear to many employees what customers with disabilities even need from online services or what steps staff need to take.
To help build awareness of potential issues and how to resolve them, the Customer Experience Initiative recently put on a Digital Accessibility Workshop. The event included not just the initiative’s ambassadors, but web content leads, Diversity and Inclusion champions and departmental ADA coordinators.
As attendees were told, and all County staff should be aware, website accessibility is not just good customer service. It’s a legal requirement. There are extensive guidelines to follow, and anyone who posts things, or makes decisions about what goes online, needs to take them into consideration.
The workshop included a demonstration by a legally blind County employee, David Stotland, of assistive technology he needs to use websites. That included a screen-reading tool, which reads aloud the text on a page.
Stotland’s demonstration, and a following presentation on common dos and don’ts, drove home the importance of having actual text on webpages and documents. County staff post a lot of PDFs online. If the PDFs are made as images, they’re invisible to people who can’t see. Adobe has instructions on making PDFs accessible.
The same goes for images or graphics with words in them. They’re often used with the intent of making a page more visually appealing. But if there is not equivalent text on the page, the information is not there for someone using an audio screen reader.
Color contrast between text and background is another common issue. There are precisely defined contrast ratios for passing or failing accessibility standards. Design decisions can’t be based solely on what someone thinks looks good.
Two buttons with different contrast between background and the text. The level of contrast on the left fails accessibility standards. The one on the right passes. You can test designs with this contrast checker.
The presentation gave a number of examples of other recommendations to make websites more accessible. Some of those were drawn from this poster created by the government of the United Kingdom (PDF), which is a handy resource with a few basic content guidelines. Go a little deeper with this Accessibility Guide by federal tech agency 18F, or all the way with the full standards of Section 508, the federal provision for website accessibility.
The workshop included a walk-through of Siteimprove, a tool the County has available to scan websites for accessibility issues. It won’t catch every type of accessibility error, but it flags many common ones. Staff interested in using it can contact Felicia Walton in CTO.
One theme recurring through the event was that many steps taken to improve the accessibility of website content will improve the experience for all customers.
The presentation slides, including several additional resources, are available on the Resources page of the Customer Experience Initiative site. You can also watch a video recording of the entire workshop.