Zoomed photo of a screen containing lines of code in HTML

Is web/app content really accessible to all?

Abstract

Including accessibility features for disabled people is crucial to qualify the developed tool as “user-friendly” or “inclusive”. As sighted people may fail to understand the accessibility obstacles encountered by users with visual impairments -partial or total blindness- we need standards, like WCAG, for engineers and developers to create tools and solutions available for as many individuals as possible. This article investigates the accessibility hardships on websites -mainly for visually impaired individuals- and the alternatives created to overcome them, with an emphasis on the importance of web accessibility.

Data from the WHO states that at least 2.2 billion people in the world-as of August 2023- are visually impaired. As formally defined in medicine, a visual impairment is a measurable reduction in vision that cannot be corrected without surgery, medication, contact lenses or glasses. And despite making up for nearly 28% of the world population, individuals with visual impairments still struggle to utilize browsers due to the lack of accessibility features. With this in mind, we may ask ourselves, what are the obstacles partially and totally blind people encounter while accessing the web and what are the features that could lessen that burden? Furthermore, we may wonder, what are the benefits that sighted people can get from those features?

To fully understand the challenges aforementioned, we need to first dive into the anatomy of a website. In other words, the main elements that compose a web page.

Simplified skeleton of a website

First, we find the header, it usually displays the brand’s visual identity and some navigation links to the most important pages. Next, we find the text content and visuals including multimedia content, buttons etc. And last, the footer, it usually includes copyrights and contact information as well as newsletter registration forms. In addition to that, some optional elements include a navigation side-menu, a slider, a search bar and a progress indicator. The choice of elements and how to arrange them into a harmonic combination is up to the developer in charge of the website. That choice is usually oriented towards able-bodied people only, as suggests this study from 2020 that found out 96% of website homepages did not meet the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines).

The results of this study corroborates Alistair Duggin’s (Accessibility engineer at Apple Inc. and Head of Accessibility at GDS, the UK Government Digital Service) words :

« Every design decision has the potential to include or exclude people».

Any hardship that disabled people may encounter concerns one of the elements mentioned, this is why the WCAG was developed in 1995 and first published in 1999, as a set of international standards its purpose is to make digital content accessible for every user including people with disabilities, the version currently used is WCAG 2.2 and the 3rd one, called W3C, is still under development. Despite being “recommendations” and not a mandatory checkpoint for websites, the importance of these guidelines is displayed through some governments’ decisions. For example: in 1992, Australia, all government websites were required to meet the A level of WCAG 2.0 requirements. In 2016, all European Union’s governments’ websites and mobile applications were required to meet the level AA requirements of WCGA 2.1, and many other instances.

Main issues faced

Moving on to the issue at hand, what are the website elements that cause an issue among the visually impaired community? And what alternatives are there to ensure all users can enjoy the web pages’ content?

To begin, multimedia content, also called non-text content. Visually impaired people rely on a feature called screen-readers, speak-screen or text-to-speech which -as the name suggests- turns every textual content on screen into a spoken content. However, this setting fails to recognize the content of a picture, video or animation inserted in a web page, this can affect how the disabled user receives the information. The solution to that is to require all non-text content to have text alternatives that screen readers can convert to speech. For example, instead of just a drawing of an arrow going down with a discount percentage mentioned on it, the developer would add the text alternative (alt text) describing the picture.

Next, text structure. In articles or blog webpages for example, the text is structured into headings, buttons and lists, many of these pages do not use proper semantics that are programmatically determined. In other words, the information we get visually from the text and paragraph formatting (bigger font and bold for titles, indentation and ­bullets for lists, drawn square for buttons, etc.) are not neatly determined in the program such that screen readers can identify them, that leads visually impaired users to listen to the whole page searching for a specific heading or button. Adopting a neat programmatically determined structure solves this issue, it provides context to the users and allows screen-to-speech to work efficiently for a more methodical browsing.

Then, color-distinguishable content. Some websites use colored backgrounds, font color, highlighting, etc to deliver information or indicate the need for an action to be performed. As an example, websites containing forms may use the color red to show the cells that were not filled or filled incorrectly, or websites differentiating an anchor text (a text with a hyperlink to another page, heading or URL) from a regular text using a blue font color only. This can be solved simply by adding a character or distinguishing textual element to convey that information, such as an asterisk for cells that were not filled in a form and by using titles that will be read before the anchor text or attributes (additional elements used to configure web pages) like ‘aria-describedby’. This will be recognized by the screen reader and communicated to the user.

It is worth mentioning that not all visually impaired people are totally blind. Some might still see, with a limited field of vision. Consequently, webpages with an insufficient contrast ratio (the difference in brightness between the background and foreground) are hard to decipher for them because the text “melts” into the background. This is easily resolved by following contrast accessibility guidelines issued by the WCAG. For example, a normal text must have a contrast ratio between 4.5:1 to 3:1 to improve readability. Or, as an optional feature, a button to increase contrast at the user’s will (a feature called “Increased contrast” in most devices) can be designed and slotted in the navigator or website’s option bar.

Another issue partially blind people might face is text spacing parameters, including line spacing, paragraph spacing, letter spacing and word spacing, if these factors are too low, the text might appear jumbled together in an unruly mess making it illegible. On one hand, the developer could solve that by experimenting with those four parameters until the text is legible with enough spacing to ensure a comfortable reading while still being aesthetically pleasing. On the other hand, a more adjustable and customizable option would be to allow the user to choose those properties on the navigator or website option bar. That way, a broad spectrum of vision loss can be taken into consideration.

It should be emphasized that the main issue with this lack of inclusivity is that some people may miss crucial information or sometimes life-saving services, and not just a loss of one form of entertainment or not being able to enjoy the visuals of the website.

Conclusion

Web accessibility features -when they are put in place- are targeted to disabled people but aren’t limited to them. To put it another way, people without disabilities can benefit from those aids. Some great illustrations of this are: elderly people customizing the size of text according to their deteriorating vision, people with limited internet access using alternative text because pictures and videos need a higher debit of connection to load, etc. Moreover, it is not wrong to say that inclusive websites benefit the user as much as it benefits the service provider. The website’s traffic increases, since it opens to new demographics. Therefore, it expands their customer base and increases sales. To put it in a nutshell, accessibility of web content is essential for disabled people and useful for everyone else.

Engineers’ main duty is to create solutions to issues in their field of work, it is a human right that all individuals, regardless of their disabilities, should be able to benefit from those solutions. And the key to that is summarized in two words: Accessibility features. This article focused on visually impaired people, but many other disabilities affect access to the web, including auditory, speech, visual and neurological conditions that should be accommodated as well.

As W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee, said at the launch of the International Program Office for Web Accessibility Initiative:

«The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.»