Web A11y: What is Web Accessibility and Why Digital Inclusion Matters
Web A11y — Stepping Towards an Inclusive Digital World for All
Accessibility, or a11y, is important to understand while creating a more inclusive global community with empathy and awareness. Web Accessibility is essential for developing inclusive products in this age of digital transformation. This post describes what is Web-Accessibility and why Digital Inclusion matters while developing products. The further posts in this series dive into the technical aspects of web accessibility principles, guidelines, best practices and techniques.
What is Accessibility (A11y)
Let’s begin with what Accessibility means. It is a broad term which signifies that everyone should have equal access to opportunities, places, facilities, technologies, resources etc. irrespective of background or circumstances.
‘a11y’ is a numeronym, which is popularly used as an abbreviation for the word “accessibility”, where the number 11 represents the number of characters between ‘a’ and ‘y’ in the word ‘accessibility’. Other popular numeronyms include W3 for ‘WWW (World Wide Web)’, i18n for ‘internationalization’ and l10n for ‘localization’.
What is Web Accessibility
Web Accessibility refers to providing an equal access to everyone for easily obtaining, understanding and using web-applications or any web-content. It is essential to ensure that everyone has equal access to the web especially in the current digital era with the surge in online facilities for healthcare, grocery, education, finances, business and more.
“The power of the Web is in its universality.
Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.”- Tim Berners-Lee, Inventor of the World Wide Web and Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
Why Digital Inclusion Matters
While visiting buildings constructed with an inclusive design, you might have observed multiple access options which would include elevators, stairs, slopes and wheelchair ramps. Similar to ensuring inclusive design in buildings and physical facilities, it is essential to ensure inclusion in web products also in the current digital era.
One of the main purposes of technological advancement is to make our day-to-day lives convenient, easier, faster and efficient. Thus, it is crucial to ensure that these technological advancements are inclusive of all. It helps to ensure that any person’s circumstances or limitations or background do not cause any sort of hindrance or barriers in their access to the web.
I had begun my journey as a software engineer in 2019 with the financial software tech-giant: Intuit. One of the initial sessions that I had attended at Intuit in 2019 was conducted in association with one of the NGOs — GiftAbled. In that session, we had explored more about Accessibility and also learnt the American Sign Language (ASL). Holding on to Intuit’s value of “We Care and Give Back”, we had also built tactile board games in that session to provide an inclusive learning and playing experience for visually impaired children. Further, I had enthusiastically attended technical workshops on web accessibility and inclusive product development as part of the Intuit’s Accessibility Champion Program. Following the Customer Driven Innovation approach at Intuit, we also conduct various valuable conversations with customers while developing the products. Along with observing and understanding their perspective about the product, these conversations also enable us to empathise with the real-time working environment of the diverse range of users. This, in turn, further equips us to cater to diverse use-cases while developing product features along with providing enhanced efficiency and productivity to the users.
Diversity of Users on the Web:
Building an inclusive web product implies that it can be accessed and utilized equally by all customers regardless of background, age, circumstances, impairments or any situational limitations. A product built with an inclusive design can provide enhanced efficiency to a diverse range of users including the following:
- Users with Auditory, Cognitive, Neurological, Physical, Speech and Visual Impairments.
- Elderly Users who have age-related health conditions.
- Users with Temporary Injuries or any Situational Limitations.
- Users who access the web on Mobile or Smaller Screen-Size Devices.
- Users who work in lesser optimal External Circumstances. It may include slow internet connection or low bandwidth, phones with cracked screens and older devices.
- Users who access the web from different locations with proficiency in different native languages.
- Keyboard Power-Users who rely majorly on using the Keyboard without much mouse-click interruptions while navigating the web-pages and accessing web-applications. Users with motor impairments prefer to use the keyboard only. In addition, the power-users including those who work on entering humongous amounts of data daily also prefer to use only the keyboard for achieving greater efficiency and productivity.
“The Web does not just connect machines, it connects people.”
- Tim Berners-Lee, Inventor of the World Wide Web and Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
Thank you for reading this blog. Click the link below to continue reading my next blog about WCAG’s 4 Principles and 13 Guidelines for Web Accessibility:
