Time flies and after four years of directive we can reflect a bit more on the positive effects beyond public sector.
Category: Accessibility statement
Latest posts:
Bogdan – can you give us an example of a website that conforms to WCAG / is accessible? A popular question with a less popular answer.
Making large scale analysis of accessibility based on centralized accessibility statements is simple. But we do need to consider that not everybody filling out accessibility statements have the needed experience and knowledge. And sometimes the intention to be transparent is also absent.
Without data we just have opinions. Having a lot of data in different formats can take time to process and sometimes also mean we can’t really compare state of accessibility if countries use different methodologies. If all countries had same data set or even better, central registry it would make data more accessible. And we could save time and money.
Concentrating on WCAG alone can feel like accessibility is always binary. When thinking about all the success criteria of the WCAG we can quickly conclude that there is not a single medium sized website in the world that conforms totally. A reflection on perfectionism, conformance and reality.
I am honored to be a part of a group of experts that will provide some feedback to European Union on accessibility and Web Accessibility Directive. This post is a summary of my ideas that will be in the article with some additional thoughts and context.
Are accessibility overlays common on Norwegian municipality websites? Short answer is no, luckily. But when they are they really messed up the site. Not only accessibility-wise but also on mobile devices / smaller screens / when zooming in.
I am not the only one concerned about accessibility and it seems that I also had similar timing, methodology and results. I didn’t go all in with the crawling of absolutely everything and I didn’t test the documents as they did. So that’s why I made a short summary to enrich my own analysis.
This is the fourth part in a series and in this post I expand the automatic analysis report to cover approximately 50 webpages under each of 356 Norwegian municipalities – 17837 URLs to be precise.
The general outcome is quite interesting and I was surprised to see some very positive trends as well.
Accessibility statements can claim all sorts of things but we should test as much as we can to establish the reality. The simplest and quickest way to do that is to use automatic tests. In this post I reflect on the results of automatic tests of homepages for all Norwegian municipalities. You will be surprised as I was.
Accessibility statements required by Web Accessibility Directive are quite efficient indicators of websites accessibility, when sites are audited by professionals with some experiences. We don’t have better data than this at the moment, so let’s process this a bit and then dive into numbers and findings.
What is the state of accessibility of municipal websites in Norway? Now we can get some data based on their official accessibility statements. While doing so we can also draw some conclusions, but this post is only the first part of a series of posts on the subject and talks mainly about motivation, methodology and preparation.
I stumbled upon a lot of websites that had untrue accessibility statements. It’s quite easy to know when they are not being honest actually. Some goes even so far to claim they are compliant and conform to WCAG 2.1 on AAA level while their autoplaying hero video with no controls is screaming “lies” to me.
Private sector should embrace accessibility statements and feedback mechanisms. Starting with measuring accessibility in processes and products and then documenting it in public while offering feedback is the best way to go.
Being busy with accessibility audits because everybody want’s to make their accessibility statements made me think about usefulness of them. When is an usability statement useful? Hint – it’s not about how good your Lighthouse scores are. It’s about how you can help real people with real problems.
In this blog post I go into details behind automatic accessibility testing and how I don’t really trust any accessibility scores such tools provide.
It all drills down to inability of automatic tools to pass WCAG success criteria and limited ability of them to fail some. Manual testing is the only real way to really know about state of accessibility.
Before you order your accessibility audit you should read this article of mine. I try to be objective and constructive and present the good and the bad, the strengths and the weaknesses of accessibility audits.
I was asked if I can issue “WCAG certificate” for a website, so I decided to investigate what would that actually mean as we all know that sites and mobile apps are constantly evolving and changing and even if they conform to WCAG they may not the following day. What would then mean to issue a WCAG certified certificate and still be ethical and the right thing to do?
To claim that our product is accessible needs more than just WCAG audit that did not discover any fails. Real users, people with disabilities are the only one that can really reflect on the accessibility of our products. That’s why we should include them in all reasonable parts of our production processes. Otherwise we may think we deliver accessibility but the truth can be opposite.
Today, 5th of February 2021 a decision was made – EFTA member states – Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland will start to integrate European Web Accessibility Directive. Another big step towards an more accessible future.
Extremely valuable documentation that reveals some interesting points about future of Web Accessibility Directive monitoring methods, tools and also some less clarified reporting matters. The accessibility statement automatic analysis will most certainly also have a central role and it is worth following on the Accessibility Conformance Testing rules that are the engine of all automatic tools out there.
I have now evaluated some simple and complex websites, and even a whole banking digital presence and here are some notes and thoughts about lessons learned.
After some practical accessibility statement preparation work I decided to describe some thoughts of mine on the best practices that can be useful for it.