Introduction

In today's digital age, not all users have equal access to online resources. Web accessibility bridges this gap by ensuring that websites and applications are usable and understandable by everyone, including individuals with disabilities. These disabilities include:

visual
auditory
mobility
seizure
cognitive

In this article, the following is discussed:

importance of web accessibility
key guidelines
best practices
tools to create an inclusive online environment.

This article is curated with the intent of illuminating ways to ensure web accessibility to:

software engineers
web developers
designers

What is web accessibility?

According to Wikipedia,

Web accessibility is the inclusive practice of ensuring there are no barriers that prevent interaction with, or access to, websites on the World Wide Web by people with physical disabilities, situational disabilities, and socio-economic restrictions on bandwidth and speed.

Web accessibility ensures that people with disabilities can access and use web applications effectively.

The following table highlights some of the disabilities and issues users experience while trying to interact with your website and web applications:

Visual	Blindness, Color blindness, Poor eyesight
Auditory	Deafness, Environmental noise
Mobility	Inability to use one’s hands, muscle slowness, Parkinson's disease
Seizure	Photo-epileptic seizures
Cognitive	Migraine, Dyslexia, PTSD

Critical principles

The members of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) are responsible for publishing the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

The WCAG are laws that outline the basis of web accessibility based on the POUR principles:

Perceivable: Users must be able to understand and be aware of the content and information presented on your website.
Operable: Users must be able to interact with elements of your website. From playing and pausing video and audio to selecting a link from a menu to navigating a page to selecting an item in a navigation bar.
Understandable: Every content on your website should be easily understood by users. The content of your website and applications should be clear and unambiguous.
Robust: Content must be able to be interpreted reliably by a wide range of user agents, including assistive technologies like screen readers.

Practices and Strategies to improve web accessibility

In adherence to the aforementioned principles, certain strategies and practices have to be utilized when developing websites and applications. Taking the following steps improves accessibility on websites and applications:

Perceivable
- Provide text alternatives: alternative text descriptions should be added to all non-text content on your site — including images, videos, and audio. This will enable non-sighted individuals to understand the contents of your website. A useful approach to this is to include alt attribute to images, tables and graphs.
```
   <img src="decorative.png" alt="wedding cake”>
```
  This instructs the screen reader that an image exists and it can ignore the graphic.
- Provide different ways to consume audio and video contents: Provide a full transcript for audio content. Additionally, ensure audio of the video is in sync with its caption.
- Make your content legible: Utilize proper color contrast so that users with color blindness can comprehend every visual information.
Operable
- Implement keyboard functionality: Your website should be completely functional without the use of a mouse or touchpad. For example, the enter key should ‘click’ a selected element
- Avoid blinking/flashing content: contents that blink or flash for more than three times in a second can cause seizures. Therefore, it’s best practice to avoid these kinds of contents.
- Clear and consistent navigation menus and headings should be provided for easier orientation of your website.
Understandable
- Write meaningful error messages: Rather than using a confusing error message, a clear description of the error and instructions should be provided.
- Use concise language: Avoid using jargon and slang to improve readability.
Robust
- Test website compatibility across various browsers and assistive technologies
- Ensure your HTML is parsable: The contents of the HTML file of your website is usually rendered in a different format using assistive technologies, like screen readers. Therefore the following should be avoided:
  - duplicate attributes within the same HTML tag.
  - duplicate IDs across elements

Tools and Technologies

To improve web accessibility, use the following tools and technologies:

Assistive technologies: these tools help people with disabilities interact with digital content. Examples include:
- Screen readers
- Voice recognition software
- Magnifiers

These tools help disabled users to navigate websites and applications seamlessly.

Automated accessibility checkers: The following are some examples:
- WAVE
- Axe
  
  These software scan your website's codebase to find common accessibility errors and flag potential issues.
ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications): It's a set of attributes that can be added to HTML elements to improve the accessibility of web content for people with disabilities. ARIA provides additional information to assistive technologies like screen readers in understanding the purpose and behavior of different elements on a web page.

Here's a simple code snippet demonstrating the use of ARIA attributes:
```
  <!DOCTYPE html>

  <html lang="en">

  <head>

    <meta charset="UTF-8">

      <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=“1.0">

     <title>ARIA Example</title>

  </head>

  <body>

    <h1>ARIA Example</h1>

    <button aria-label="Click me" onclick="alert('Button clicked!')”> 
        Click
    </button>

     <div role="status" aria-live="polite">
        Updates will be announced here.
     </div>

  </body>

  </html>
```
In this example, the button has an aria-label attribute to provide a custom label for screen readers. The <div> element with role="status" and aria-live="polite" attributes informs assistive technologies that its content should be announced to the user, but without interrupting their current task.
Color contrast checker tools : Tools like,

are used to evaluate the contrast between two colors in terms of their perceived brightness and readability. They are important for ensuring that digital contents are accessible to people with visual impairments.

Captions and Transcripts tools: Captioning and transcription tools ensure individuals with hearing impairments and difficulty understanding audio understand online content. Some tools include the following:
- Rev
- Able player
- Otter.ai

In addition, W3C has a list of tools and technologies to learn more about.

Benefits of Improving web accessibility

Utilizing accessibility practices such as the ones aforementioned benefits individuals with disabilities. Additionally, the overall user experience is improved.

Other several benefits include:

Inclusivity: Ensuring your website is accessible makes it usable by a wider range of people, including those with disabilities. This fosters inclusivity and equal access to information and services
Legal compliance: Many countries have laws and regulations requiring websites to be accessible. Complying with these regulations helps you avoid legal issues and potential penalties.
SEO benefits: For example, adding alternative texts to images and having transcripts for videos improves your website SEO. Furthermore, a site adhering to web accessibility guidelines leads to increased higher rankings in relevant search results.
Enhanced usability: Web accessibility improvements often lead to better overall usability for all users, not just those with disabilities. Clear navigation, logical structure, and well-designed content benefit everyone.

References and Resources

Conclusion

In summary, improving web accessibility is an imperative. Online content should be accessed and interacted with by every individual irrespective of their challenges or limitations.

Engineers, developers and designers should build solutions to ensure equal access to all users.

Kelechi Kizito Ugwu