Web Accessibility & Suggestions

Web accessibility defines a broad spectrum of practices that make browsing the internet more accessible. Through the increased focus on accessibility of the web pages, it becomes possible to make a website inclusive to a variety of disability groups including but not limited to those with visual, auditory, and motor impairments. The accessibility of web pages gained more importance as the world wide web became a standard and the implementation of web browsers ended up in many devices we use today. Thanks to this distributed aspect of the web, it has become easier to draft standards for it, since websites rely on the same protocol, and not every device needs adjustment based on their capabilities.

The history on web accessibility dates back to the early days of internet; in fall of 1996, the organization “Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)” was founded under the foundation of US-based World Wide Web Consortium (Dardailler, 2009). Since then, this initiative has provided and directed standards on how to make web pages more accessible. The organization also serves as the formal documentation/guideline for web developers, who implement the standards issued. The organization also focuses on research and rapid development on accessibility. For example, recent research addresses the inaccessibility of CAPTCHA (a technology used to distinguish users from web automation bots), which relies on identification and selection of curated visuals (Hollier et al., 2021).

Web accessibility is also subject to legislation in many countries. In the European Union, a law under “Web and Mobile Accessibility Directive” was passed in 2016. The aim of the law is to make the websites and mobile applications of public sector organizations accessible to people with disabilities, which accounts for approximately eighty million people in the EU. The law not only forces the implementation of accessibility practices in public sector applications, but also requires an implementation of a feedback mechanism in which people could report the issues they are having with the applications they use (“Directive 2016/2102”, 2016). In the United States there are a variety of laws that concern the technology and accessibility for disability groups, the latest one being “Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act” (n.d.), which also covers private sector (“Web Accessibility Laws & Policies”, 2018). In Turkey, there is no law specifically concerning the accessibility of the web, however it is required by Act №5378 that measures be taken to ensure the accessibility of technological communication tools. Research conducted by Doğan (2019) concluded that the majority of the websites of the public sector in Turkey failed to deliver the accessibility standards, and more emphasis and audition is necessary to enforce the accessibility of these websites.

To understand the mechanisms of web accessibility, it is helpful to look at most common issues websites have and how they could be solved. One of the most prominent issues is the presentation of visual material, namely images. When images appear on a web page, users with blindness or partial visual impairment cannot comprehend the structure of the content, and naturally they have to resort to the context and guess what’s in the picture. To make serving of images more accessible, web developers need to provide an “alt text” for images, an HTML attribute which could be caught by screen readers or similar accessibility software. Of course, the images are not always static, nowadays, user generated content fills the web. In this case, developers need to implement solutions so that this “alt text” would be entered by the user itself.

Another issue regards the partially blind. It is very common to see web pages consisting of blocks of text with a very low contrast rate. Similarly, small font-sizes are also a problem. To fix these issues, developers can use automated tools which suggest darker or lighter colors depending on the context as well as suggestions on font size, using WAI recommendations (such tools include “axe DevTools” and “Google Lighthouse”).

Another common issue is related to the structure of a webpage. It is important to have good semantic distinction of the sections of a web page so that the users can navigate easily while only using the keyboard. For example, the main sections of the website should be marked so that users can frequently make transitions from one section to another. It is also helpful to mark certain elements of the page with proper HTML counterparts. For example, the main heading (or title) of the page should be marked as “h1” and following subheadings should continue using “h2”, “h3” and so on, depending on the level. This semantic markup ensures a more meaningful and easier navigation experience, as well as giving a robust idea on the page structure for the user. However, many developers neglect this issue and mark all elements as “div” (a general tag that has no semantic value) which leads to the page being a load of unstructured text.

Lastly, accessibility issues are raised when users try to fill a form. Generally, developers neglect putting proper labels for the forms and users have no idea which field is being filled. For example, it is common to see a search box at the top of the web page, and the only indicator is a button with a magnifier icon (which has no alt text). In such a case, the user navigating with a screen reader may struggle to figure out what that input does. Another example is when the users fill invalid information. When the only changing thing is input’s border being red, users with screen readers have no way to tell they are entering an invalid value. Considering these, it is important to mark all form elements with a label, as well as putting a description or title describing the purpose of the form. It is also important to announce the dynamic changes in the web page to the user. Solutions for these problems can be implemented by using “ARIA” attributes, namely “aria-label” and “aria-live”.

As it can be seen, the technical aspect of accessibility has a long-running history thanks to contributions of WAI. However, today it is still the case that accessibility practices on the web are neglected. One of the most prominent reasons is that, to account for accessibility developers need to make extra effort; that means learning more technical knowledge. By this fact, it is apparent that it is of the utmost importance that developers incorporate accessibility issues while they are learning the basics of web development. To achieve this, online tutorials, learning materials and university courses could be adjusted to include accessibility considerations. For example, instead of opening an HTML tutorial with the “div” tag, it could be adjusted to introduce semantic tags first so that the learner can understand that they can use different constructs to convey meaning on a web page, through code.

Most of the learning material on the web lacks such consideration as they are generally intended to be fast-learning programs. Since the web sector rapidly looks for and hires new programmers, corporations’ influence on programmer profile is very important. For this reason, the private sector could make the biggest influence by requiring programmers to know about accessibility. However, one issue is that coding for accessibility costs more, due to increased development time and considerations; so, the private sector would be reluctant to invest in such a program. This urges social mobilization to rapidly demand and prefer accessibility so that the private sector would have to adapt. This mobilization could be achieved by civil campaigns, through NGO’s and the intervention of the government. As an example of a civil campaign, a website could be established which showcases/exposes websites with worst and best accessibility practices. Corporations would then feel obliged to fix their website so that they are not on the top of the “worst” list (or they could increase the accessibility more to be on top of the “best”).

Of course, this process of civil mobilization is a difficult and lengthy one. During this process, alternative solutions could be developed to reduce workload. For example, emphasis on automating accessibility could be increased. Static code analysis tools could be further improved to reduce the burden on the developer. Development environments such as IDE’s and text editors could be preloaded with accessibility tools which automatically check issues, for increased awareness.

In summary, the accessibility issue calls for the voice of society (as it is always the case for such matters), however since there is a technical aspect to it, improvements can still be made by increasing computer automation that would fix erroneous developer design. Awareness on a personal level is also quite important since it takes one persons’ effort to make a website from unusable to usable; that signifies the inducing of awareness through learning material.

Dardailler, D. (2009, June). WAI History. W3C. Retrieved June 1, 2022, from https://www.w3.org/WAI/history

Directive 2016/2102. EUR-Lex. (2016, December). Retrieved June 1, 2022, from https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2016/2102/oj

Doğan, A. (2019). Türkiye’deki Devlet Kurumlarına Ait Web Sitelerinin Web Erişilebilirliği Durumu ve Bölgeler Arasındaki Farklılıkların İncelenmesi.

Hollier, S., Sajka, J., White, J., & Cooper, M. (Eds.). (2021, December). Inaccessibility of CAPTCHA. W3C. Retrieved June 1, 2022, from https://www.w3.org/TR/turingtest/

Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act. Federal Communications Commission. (n.d.). Retrieved June 1, 2022, from https://www.fcc.gov/general/twenty-first-century-communications-and-video-accessibility-act-0

Web Accessibility Laws & Policies. Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). (2018). Retrieved June 1, 2022, from https://www.w3.org/WAI/policies/