We all rely on websites. We use them to register for classes, find information for our projects, pay bills, and more. Chances are, you may even be reading this article on a website right now. Since websites make up such a vital part of our lives, they must be designed well so that every user can have a positive experience — especially since 88% of users won’t return to a website again if they have a negative experience on it. A big step in making sure users don’t have negative experiences on websites is prioritizing web accessibility.
The World Wide Web Consortium — an organization that develops principles for how to make websites accessible for all users — explains web accessibility in the following manner: “Web accessibility means that websites, tools, and technologies are designed and developed so that people with disabilities can use them.”
Web accessibility benefits people with a wide variety of disabilities, from those that are physical to those that are neurological. However, web accessibility isn’t just limited to members of the disabled community. Some examples of this include making websites usable on different devices, such as a laptop or a mobile phone, or providing text-to-speech so that users with poor vision can still be aware of what content they are looking at. These features may seem minor, but they actually are what enhance someone’s experience on a site; they allow anyone to still be able to interact with and understand the content of a website. With these features, any user can access the site and use it for its intended purpose.
“These features may seem minor, but they actually are what enhance someone’s experience on a site; they allow anyone to still be able to interact with and understand the content of a website.”
So, how many people are impacted by web accessibility? According to the CDC, around 28.7% of adults in the US have a disability. Within this, around 5.5% of adults in the US have a vision-related disability or severe vision issues and around 6.2% of adults in the US have a hearing-related disability or severe hearing issues.
In terms of how accessible websites are these days, a 2024 report analyzed the home pages of the top 1,000,000 websites. They saw an astounding 56,791,260 distinct accessibility errors. Some of these issues included images missing alternative text, empty buttons (buttons without text), and empty links (links without text). These are all common issues that people may not realize affect people with disabilities. Some other examples include poor contrast between text and background, videos without captions, and pages where you can only navigate with a mouse. While these issues may not affect everyone, someone with vision problems may not be able to understand what they’re reading if there is poor contrast. Additionally, someone with motor impairments may not be able to use a mouse. As such, they’re not able to access the full potential of the site and its intended purpose, and may choose to not use that site again.
So if you are working on a site yourself, what are some things you can include to promote accessibility? A 2017 paper from the Weave Journal of Library User Experience lists out best practices for accessible sites. Not relying heavily on jargon, including different types of headings to catch readers’ attention, and using descriptive text with hyperlinks can all help websites be more accessible. Website accessibility is crucial in this day and age, since everyone deserves the right to access information online. We need to make sure that websites take into account that not everyone has the same abilities but that regardless, they all have the same information.