What is Accessibility?

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary describes the word accessibility as:

The concept of accessibility seems to refer to whether a product or service is usable by everyone—however they come across it. Although accessibility laws exist to help people with disabilities, designers and organizations should strive to accommodate all potential users in a variety of contexts. This has clear advantages, most notably improved designs for all.

Let’s see now what these laws are about.

Laws of Accessibility

The World Wide Web Consortium developed the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as technical web accessibility standards (W3C).

The guidelines are a shared, international standard developed by a diverse group of stakeholders, including industry, disability organizations, government, and accessibility research organizations.

The World Wide Web Consortium (WCAG) is not a legal requirement, but rather a set of globally accepted standards. The guidelines aim to make websites, apps, electronic documents, and other digital assets accessible to people with disabilities ranging from sensory to intellectual, learning, and physical.

When website designers, developers, and content authors follow WCAG, they can remove many of the barriers that people with disabilities face when navigating a website or other digital assets.

Here are a few examples:

• Images must include descriptive alternative text (ALT text) so that blind people can read a description of the image that accurately conveys its meaning.
• The on-page text must be realizable without interfering with how the page displays so that people with vision disabilities can magnify content and read more easily.
• To accommodate the needs of people who need more time to fill out forms, all form-entry tasks must exist without a time limit or include an extended, lengthy time limit.
• Components that exist on multiple web pages, such as navigation, headers, footers, and sidebars, must appear consistently throughout the site so that users know where to find them regardless of which page they're on.
• Your website must be navigable without the use of a mouse. Users should be able to navigate through any given page by using the "tab" button on their keyboard.