Are you looking to make your website more accessible to a wider audience? Ensuring that your website meets the WCAG 2.2 accessibility standards is a crucial step in reaching users with disabilities. By following these steps, you can make your website more inclusive and legally compliant with accessibility standards.
Step 1: Understand the Guidelines
The first step to making your website 2.2 accessibility compliant is to familiarize yourself with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2. These updated guidelines, released in October 2023, outline the best practices for making web content accessible to individuals with disabilities. They are internationally recognized standards so will meet the requirements for 508 government projects in the U.S. as well as those in the European Union. They can be daunting at first glance, so many companies will bring in a specialist to educate them and get them started.
Step 2: Conduct an Accessibility Audit
Performing an accessibility audit is essential to identify any barriers that may prevent people with disabilities from accessing your website. There are several tools available that can help you assess the accessibility of your website, including automated testing tools, browser extensions, and screen reader simulators. Use these tools to identify and address accessibility issues such as color contrast, keyboard navigation, and alternative text for images. I highly recommend that everyone on the team listen to the pages through a screen reader.
Step 3: Implement Accessibility Features
Once you have identified accessibility issues, it's time to implement the necessary features to make your website compliant. Involving multiple teams in the content delivery process, this may include adding alternative text to images, ensuring that all interactive elements are keyboard accessible, and improving the color contrast of text and background. Additionally, consider adding features such as resizable text and text-to-speech functionality to make your website more user-friendly for individuals with disabilities. Some of these things are low hanging fruit, such as alt tags and ensuring color contrasts. If however, your site doesn't support tabbing as a means to navigate, you may need to spin up development support.
Step 4: Provide Accessibility Training
It's crucial to educate your teams about the importance of web accessibility and how to maintain 2.2 compliance. Providing training on accessibility guidelines and best practices will enable your team to create and maintain accessible web content. This will also help ensure that new features and content added to your website are also compliant with accessibility standards. Crucially, getting your site to compliancy isn't a one and done. It has to become part of the ongoing delivery checklist, in order to maintain.
Step 5: Test and Iterate
Once you have implemented accessibility features, it's important to test your website to ensure that it meets 2.2 compliance standards. Training your QA team and to add accessibility to their checklist helps detect day to day slips. Conducting regular accessibility testing and user testing will help identify any ongoing issues and ensure that your website remains accessible to all users.
By following these steps, you can make your website more inclusive and compliant with 2.2 accessibility standards, ensuring that all users, regardless of their abilities, can access and interact with your website. Making your website accessible is not only an ethical responsibility but also a legal requirement in many countries.