The AccessibilityAccessibilityAccessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) Team shares accessibility expertise across the project to improve the accessibility of WordPress coreCoreCore is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. and resources.
You can also ask questions during Accessibility Team Office Hours every Wednesday at 14:00 UTC in the accessibility channel in SlackSlackSlack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/..
Web accessibilityAccessibilityAccessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) refers to the inclusive practice of removing barriers that prevent access to websites by people with disabilities.
The Web is for everyone, not just those who see, hear and move well. Building your website for inclusion, rather than exclusion, increases access for people of all abilities; as well as for all types of browsers and search engines.
Accessibility is often abbreviated as a11yAccessibilityAccessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility); “a” is the first character of the word, and “y” the last , with 11 characters in between. (similar to i18n for “internationalization”). So when you tweet about accessibility, use the hashtags #a11y or #wpa11y.
Here are some challenges users encounter on inaccessible websites:
Cheyenne has arthritis and cannot use a mouse, She uses a keyboard but cannot activate a hamburger menu.
Cortez has Parkinson’s disease. His hands are not steady enough to mouse-click on a link with tiny text.
Louis uses a screen reader. He struggles to understand a page’s content because its markup has no logical heading structure.
Kaia is blind. Links that are an image or an icon font, with no link text, are effectively invisible to her.
Carlos is color blind. He can’t distinguish the red links from the black text.
Ray is in his 50s. His eyesight has degraded. He can no longer read small grey text on top a darker grey background.
Braiden has ADD. A distracting animation in the sidebarSidebarA sidebar in WordPress is referred to a widget-ready area used by WordPress themes to display information that is not a part of the main content. It is not always a vertical column on the side. It can be a horizontal rectangle below or above the content area, footer, header, or any where in the theme., with no user-control for stopping, prevents her from focusing on the page content.
Alyssa is deaf. A video without subtitles is unusable to her.
Yurem has Down syndrome. He can’t comprehend the content of a webpage because the writing is unnecessarily complicated.
Jabari lives in Western Africa. He has a slow Internet connection. Sites bloated with heavy scripts and images keep him from browsing a substantial portion of the Web.
These people — and many more like them — already face lots of life challenges. By adopting the a11y best practices you can ensure your website does not add their challenges.
An inclusive website enhances your business. It will:
Increase Traffic. More people can complete orders in your web shop.
Comply with the Law. Your website is better prepared to adhere to your nation’s accessibility regulations and government contract requirements.
Improve SEO. Google, the largest user of the internet, is blind and deaf.
The website you build is not for you, or even your client. It’s for the users. Increasing accessibility instantly gains you a larger potential user-base.
Entire countries are among this increased user-base: Israel, Norway and Australia require all company websites to be accessible. Many other nations have laws regarding website accessibility.
Another vital group of users with neither sight nor hearing are search engines. Improving accessibility improves your site’s Google visibility, thus improving your search engine optimization.
For developers web accessibility means a way of thinking often called progressive enhancement:
Let the HTMLHTMLHTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a markup language that is used in the development of web pages and websites. tell the content.
Let the CSSCSSCSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. present the content.
Let the JavaScriptJavaScriptJavaScript or JS is an object-oriented computer programming language commonly used to create interactive effects within web browsers. WordPress makes extensive use of JS for a better user experience. While PHP is executed on the server, JS executes within a user’s browser. https://www.javascript.com/. interact with the content.
This division helps you create websites that are more easier to maintain and update, and is considered to be a (c)lean approach to web development.
A11y includes everyone when building websites. Think of it as your ally in optimizing your website’s user-experience, for as many people as possible, while furthering your business or organizational goals.