Are you thinking about accessibility today?

May 18th is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). Web accessibility is something that can help make the web a more usable place for anyone, anywhere on any device or technology. If you don’t already think accessibly, today is the best day to start.

The purpose of GAAD is to get everyone in the digital world talking, thinking and learning about digital accessibility. To get you thinking about the web and accessibility I have a simple task for you.

For 10 minutes turn off/unplug your mouse or if you have a laptop avoid the trackpad, then try to browse your favourite website without the use of the mouse pointer.

• Did you find the task easy?
• As you navigated could you follow where you were on the page?
• Could you interact and control everything on the page, like you could with a mouse?
• Could you navigate the website at all?

Your experience only lasted for 10 minutes, unless you rage quit before the 10 minute mark. Luckily you have the option of a mouse but some of the following people cant or have trouble using a mouse effectively.

• People with fine motor control restrictions. (Parkinsons, severe arthritis, etc.)
• Those with disabled hands/arms. (War vets, accident victims)
• Anyone with large motor control issues. (Multiple sclerosis)
• Those that don’t have a mouse. (Broken or missing devices)
• Power users who prefer to use keyboard. (Software developers, typists, etc.)

For some of the above people their day to day life is your 10 minute experience. Surely we all know someone who could fit into one of the above descriptions, wouldn’t it be awesome if their experience was just as enjoyable as yours?

So how can we improve the accessibility of websites for keyboard users?

• make sure buttons and links can be controlled and navigated to by keyboard
• provide a visible focus state to help users track their location
• use known patterns to allow more keyboard access to certain components e.g main menus

That is just a taste of what you can do to help keyboard users.

Now lets think about everyone else, there are users who are:

• blind or have significant difficulty seeing even with glasses
• have some form of colour vision deficiency.
  In Australia, about 8% of males and 0.4% of females suffer colour blindness to some degree.
• have a hearing disability
• have a cognitive disability (difficulty remembering, concentrating, or making decisions)
• have language issues (english not being the users primary language)

The fact is over a billion people, about 15% of the world’s population, have some form of disability, yet websites still aren't accessible.

Making websites more accessible helps create more independence for users who have disabilities, making the web a better place for everyone.

Hopefully reading this has start the wheels turning over in your head about the importance of web accessibility, maybe even started a conversation in your workplace.

If your interested in the topic of accessibility but are not sure where to start, try to get out to some of the public events that are running as part of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, because awareness is where it all starts.

Thanks for reading, please leave a comment or message me your thoughts on accessibility and GAAD.