We must mention the WebAIM (Web Accessibility In Mind, opens in new window) and their extensive effort to highlight the state of web accessibility (among other non-profit accessibility efforts). Their WebAIM Million project that analyses top million home pages and exposes top accessibility failures (opens in new window) and errors should be known to all in the industry.
So what are most common accessibility errors:
- Low color contrast of text, leading as it has been discovered in 86% of cases. This means that designers should respect the contrast ratios when they design and that developers should also be cautious when implementing the designs. Mistakes that are caught early cost less to fix. Interestingly this has worsen in 2020. Was on 85% a year before.
- No surprises here – second place belongs to missing alternative text for images. 66% of websites tested had problems with this. Developer should make the tag dynamic, so that author have the possibility to write a good alternative text if image is not decorative. Some graphics elements can also use adjacent text for their alternative description. Useful for graphs and infographics. So it is partially also a designer’s task to make it into raw design. The good thing is that this type of error is lesser in 2020 than it was in 2019. So it shows that some efforts have been made. But we need more alternative text and we need it now. Will be interesting to see next year’s stats, when we think of new EU rules etc.
- Empty links are third in line. Almost 60% of all pages being tested had empty links. This may sound a bit strange but it happens a lot. CMS should really prevent this. Or if links are used for JavaScript triggers they should have some progressive enhancement built in. Empty links can easily be caught with automatic tools so they should be checked with automatic accessibility testing.
- Forms missing form labels came forth. More than half (53.8%) of all tested sites had some problems with missing form labels. Trend is even showing that this number is worse for a percent (this means ten thousand sites !) – comparing to year 2019. Using placeholders instead of semantic labels due to artistic designs is a large cause for that. Designers and developers should communicate clearly about the forms and always use correct semantics for all (form) elements.
- Empty buttons got fifth place. We have probably not seen a lot of empty buttons because they have an icon in them, for example. But for a assistive technology user this icon should have an alternative text to describe it’s meaning. And it is easy to forget about it when we get an design wire-frame. This is, in my opinion, a direct consequence of missing alternative text problem and should again be caught in the first phase of development – when developer is implementing the design. Designer and developer should discuss this matter in the early phase and also inform the authors / editors about providing correct texts and assuring that they provide it (validation in CMS or maybe at latest an acceptance criteria / documentation to-do checklist or some other communication channel). Automatic, pre-release test or a screen-reader pre-release test should also discover this and therefore it should not be published before fixed.
- The sixth place went to missing document language. This one is easy to forget in case of a custom development or custom CMS or even when multi-language CMS does not map domains with languages etc. Extremely important though as screen-readers (and probably also search engine crawlers) need language when for example reading text to the end user. Otherwise default language is presumed and it may not be the same as we would like. You can maybe imagine a screen-reader set to English reading a Spanish website with English vocabulary.
Role of content management systems and technologies behind them
WebAIM’s million project also reveals a bit on influence of content management system (CMS) on accessibility error occurrences. CMS and other authoring tools have definitely a great impact on the content accessibility, so they really do enable better accessibility for the end users, although authors must know how to correctly use them in the first place.
Some positive trends are shown for cloud hosted CMS solutions (that are not free), but there are also some open source CMS that improved the published accessibility (opens in new window). Please note that correlations between errors and choice of platform can not be attributed only to the technology and provider as it is also important to include designer, developer and author/editor involvement (for example accessibility of the chosen dynamic elements / selected themes / widgets and so on).
So – CMS can help in a way but the more customized your solution is the more it depends on the custom parts being accessible (alone and in a context).
It would be interesting to compare the effect on new WordPress (Gutenberg, React-Based) on accessibility, especially in the first versions of it. Majority of all CMS vendors (open source and closed source / cloud alike) are investing a lot on their Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) compliance as well, and that is a very good indicator for the future. As ATAG is also enabling accessibility for the tool itself and the content that is made with the tool (CMS).