I love the effects of WAD (Web Accessibility Directive) here in Europe for many reasons. It’s not perfect, I’m not saying that. WAD reports and first official experiences give a lot of evidence that we are still at the beginning of a long path. But at least we have a direction and our goals are worth of the journey. One of the most important things besides awareness that we got from WAD is the communication channel dedicated to accessibility. And this is an opportunity that should be embraced beyond the public sector. And probably will some day also be required for private sector by the law. Looking at you, European Accessibility Act.
Private sector should embrace Web Accessibility Directive
I really mean this – embracing accessibility statements and accessibility feedback is ethical and also good for business. It is a sign that we care, as a company. If it’s not only abused for marketing and branding that is. Honest accessibility statement isn’t there to show off that we are WCAG compliant. It’s a bold statement and often a warning signal to people with disabilities and others that have at least a clue about accessibility.
Accessibility statement – be honest and don’t abuse it for your branding goals
Accessibility statement is not meant to be a marketing page for our branding improvement campaign. It should give people useful and sincere information about the accessibility problems, alternatives and roadmaps. What we know we have to fix and will fix and when, to put it simply. I have been around some time now and I must say that claiming perfect accessibility is not being honest. I have yet to find a page that doesn’t have any problems at all. So being honest is the only sustainable way of doing accessibility statements.
Feedback mechanism – don’t just pretend, make it a priority
Feedback mechanism for people that have difficulties using your page is sometimes seen as a problem in itself. Especially for people that don’t know better or will not be honest about the state of accessibility on the web. We all know that web is a living organism and even if we have most of the things under control we can’t really be totally sure that some parts are not optimal or broken. A content provider pasting a screen-shot with alternative text of “Screen shot” can be an example for that.
So having a feedback mechanism is a must when we are mature enough to understand the sustainability problem. And then we also have to make it a priority in our organization to respond quickly and correctly. “We’ll look into it” doesn’t help people. People need helpful feedback in general and people with disabilities deserve it as well.
You are what you measure – same goes for accessibility
If you are not very familiar with accessibility you should maybe get somebody to help you. An accessibility audit can be a great start for measuring current situation and must be used as a guideline for next actionable items and budgets related to them. I have done quite a lot of audits lately and as far as I can understand most of them were done because of WAD and it’s accessibility statement. But when we went through the results I could detect that people finally understood what kind of barriers they had. And helping to resolve the barriers most efficiently and with right priorities should be a part of any accessibility audit that we are offered.
So measuring is the first step, but must not be the last step. WAD demands that accessibility statements are updated at least once per year, but unfortunately some organizations just update the date on them and not the content.
It should become our second nature to make accessibility a part of our organization from top to bottom and other way around.