Web Accessibility

Promoting Digital Access

When the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) passed in 1990, many individuals with disabilities in the United States gained physical access and rights to places historically inaccessible. Visiting sites such as the ADA Legacy Project or ADA Anniversary gives us an appreciation for just how far we've come in those short 25 years, from Universal Design features such as curb cuts and automatic door openers to more social justice ideas such as these featured on the blog Words I Wheel By: 

• More equal opportunities for people with all types of disabilities to receive a public education
• Greater social involvement among the disability community in all areas of society
• Expanded employment opportunities for disabled people
• Disabled athletes can thrive in adaptive sports
• Support systems exist for people with all types of disabilities
• Misconceptions and prejudices can be more easily debunked
• There is a bigger presence of disability in the media
• Adaptive products are more widely available
• There is a bigger focus on studying disability in academia
• Provides a legal basis to maintain momentum in pursuing accessibility and justice
• Helps prevent discriminatory actions or retaliation
• Social recognition of disabled people as full, contributing citizens

What I hope to focus on in this blog are adaptive products. On that note, a product that has revolutionized our society has been the advent of the internet, and for brevity, this post will focus on web design.

A great introduction to making the web accessible was compiled by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) which very simply and thoroughly goes through the what, why, and how of making web pages accessible. They are the organization behind the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines that are the current standard for web accessibility (as of this post, their guidelines are at the 2.0 revision).

Web design can be pretty complex. For our purposes, the main goals of accessible web design follow the principles of the ADA: provide equal access and equal opportunity to all users. Some basic tenants of accessible web design are universally applicable, such as simple, easy to navigate websites. For those so inclined, the WAI group has very comprehensive guidelines and techniques for you to review. If you're not involved in web design, a cool resource to check out to see if a website you are affiliated with or visit is accessible is WAVE, which stands for Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool. Simply pop in the URL of the website you'd like to check, and WAVE runs it through its system of checks (and then, if it's your website, you can send the results to your IT department to fix). Kind of neat!