5 years of Web Accessibility Directive went fast. Progress is evident, but is it enough?
Category: Economics and accessibility
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Long story short – all political party websites have issues, some are really obvious and all are excluding some groups of people. They should do better if they want to get votes from as many as possible. And shift accessibility left does not mean political left!
A couple posts back I pointed out latest WebAIM Million shows shopping websites have worst accessibility, and it seems that shopping native mobile applications also share this unfortunate faith.
You have already read about why is it important and I hope you also understand that it’s not a project but a continuous program, or even better – an upgrade of a culture. But how to prepare?
If you don’t believe me – check the latest draft of Accessibility Roles and Responsibilities Mapping and translate it to your product / service / organization.
Not a very well known fact, but all products and services that are in the scope of EAA and include support services will also need to have them accessible.
We have a lot of good accessibility guidelines for web content, documents and multimedia. But what about accessibility of games on mobile phones and tablets? Things can be quite complex there, but that also allows for innovation.
Save yourself time and resources and prepare before you buy an accessibility audit with these tips.
Demographics tells us that we need help. Automating the physical world requires robots. We need them to be accessible!
Authentication is often a burden to many different groups of users, but for people depending on assistive technologies it can be a total barrier. What can we do to improve that?
Tables are sometimes critical for understanding, and even if HTML supports quite complex tables we should keep them as simple as possible.
European public sector websites and mobile apps are required to have feedback mechanism. I believe that such feedback helps any kind of organization, even single person businesses.
Native mobile applications are often more focused and with that – less noisy for users (and I meant that visually and non-visually). But platform choices can lead to inevitable inaccessibility as some abstractions lack support.
Time flies and after four years of directive we can reflect a bit more on the positive effects beyond public sector.
Question of dealing with conflicts between aesthetics and accessibility comes up a lot and sometimes it’s easy to just let one side win and be done with it. I think that we need a cultural shift to have both of them.
Focusing on single channel alone is not enough, how to make sure accessibility is implemented throughout or channels? Leadership needs to lead!
Dear leader, this is a letter to you. If you lead people, you need to lead accessibility.Do not just delegate it. You will thank me later.
I did some work with conversion rate optimization and I couldn’t help myself thinking about how accessibility impacts conversion.
If people treat EAA as yet another compliance thing I think they are missing the greater picture, and probably also greater business.
Second Slovenian Accessibility Awareness Day was quite a success, my contribution this time was a manual accessibility audit of crucial WCAG success criteria of larger e-commerces, supported by a team from a11y.si
Accessibility audits come in different forms and sometimes it is better to take smaller audits than to wait for the larger ones to be finished – and risk missing out on changes that had to happen in the meanwhile.
Sometimes it can be hard to embrace accessibility when we only consider the business perspective. And some people need harsh motivation, when good for people and good for business arguments are not enough.
Prevention of accessibility issues starts long before we code. It is also true for design systems. Sometimes we need much more time to fix things, even if we use a design system…
Digital transformation without accessibility can’t really be called digitalization as it will produce the need to provide alternative formats manually, not to even mention all the problems with bias when relying solely on artificial intelligence.
Don’t think accessibility audit alone will help making things accessible. It can even mean ineffective use of resources as there are several things you need to consider before just auditing.
eGovernment Benchmark of 35 countries in Europe (EU and beyond) finally gathered some insights about accessibility of eGovernment websites. After years of accessibility legislation accessibility is still a pilot indicator which unfortunately indicates how late we are in the awareness process.
My first academic article called General Strategies for Improving Accessibility of E-commerce was accepted on a Slovenian Digital Inclusion conference. It was an interesting experience writing it and in this post I reflect on some important things.
Some brief thoughts on how to make a small business more accessible, at least digitally. Don’t take it as a project, it is a program, a journey.
Advertising is big money. Making your ads inaccessible is expensive. In this post I summarize some common accessibility issues that are present in online adverts.