Last night I watched Zone of Interest a German movie with English subtitles that were, at times, illegible with white text on a light background. This low contrast made it hard to read (and the subject matter made it hard to watch). It made me think of a post that Lawrence Shaw sent me this week - WebAIM's latest report looking at 1 million website homepages for the most common accessibility issues. In her post Laurie says “96% of errors fall into six categories. These common errors have been the same for the last 5 years” For more than 20 years at Bowen Craggs accessibility has been one of the important factors we look at in our annual ranking of corporate websites. We are not accessibility experts but strongly believe good accessibility is vital for success. We originally based our scoring on WebAIM’s WAVE tool which, as well as the WCAG standard, have been around for years. How can it be that a huge number of simple errors persist & have shown no sign of changing over the years? We have standards, we have tools & we have the moral motivation to do the right thing for society. But that aside, why would you let down a big chunk of your customers, employees, job seekers, partners, investors visiting your website? And it’s a bigger chunk than you think. Val Ashton digital engagement manager at Unilever told me “1 in 7 people have a disability” that’s 15% of your audience! The WebAIM report says low contrast text is the biggest failure of WCAG guidelines. I assume this is for the same reason that movie subtitles are hard to read on some backgrounds - aesthetics 😡 I asked my designer friend Lydia Thornley what she thought & she agreed this was most likely a misguided design choice. I went on to suggest that the other common failures: missing alt text, missing form labels and empty links were a technical failure rather than the fault of designers. She disagreed “Design is there to get people to read the words”. Good design makes a product useful and understandable as well as looking good. She added “If you get information right for someone with ADHD, you might also get it right for someone who is time-poor like a journalist” (or a sleepy movie-watcher on a Saturday evening). So the failure to describe images, transcribe video, make forms easy to understand and label links with text that makes you click them is a failure of the organisation to take communications seriously. It's the responsibility of the copywriters, user experience designers AND of their colleagues, managers and board members to think and act inclusively. The online world must be available to all regardless of their ability, age, cultural or socioeconomic background. “This is for everyone” as Tim Berners-Lee once said. Developing digital services for a wide range of human diversity, ensures that everyone can participate fully and equally. It includes creating content and communities that support diverse voices and perspectives. #Inclusive #digitalaccessibility
This accessibility study needs more visibility! WebAim’s annual accessibility report. They analyze the top 1 million websites for accessibility. https://lnkd.in/dbXZZM6G To me this is a really impactful insight from the study: “96.4% of all errors detected fall into these six categories. These most common errors have been the same for the last 5 years. Addressing just these few types of issues would significantly improve accessibility across the web.” The 6 Categories are low contrast text, missing alt text, missing form labels, empty links, empty buttons, missing document language. Y’all… these are the basics!! We can make significant impacts to accessibility and the user experience by addressing these top 6 errors. Accessibility is possible! Building accessibility into the content creation process is the solution. Share this post for reach! We can do this together! #accessibility #DEI #AccessibilityMatters
Great post Dan!
Higher Impact Changes for Complex Digital Presences / Author of Website Migration Handbook and Content Chimera
6moI recently watched that movie and also noted impossible/very-difficult-to-read subtitles at times. My wife and I were wondering if that was intentional in the context of that specific movie. The production value was so high overall that I couldn't help but think, in this case, it was intentional?