Framing digital accessibility

What is digital accessibility?

  • Beyond websites: Mobile apps
  • WCAG 2.1 Level AA
  • Allows people with disabilities to access same information and engage in same transactions at same time with equivalent ease of use
  • People with all disabilities
    • Blind/low vision
    • Deaf/hearing loss
    • Manual dexterity
    • Cognitive
  • Coding to work with assistive technology and to work for people with disabilities
    • Alt text for images
    • Labeled form fields
    • Keyboard-only navigation
    • Color contrast
    • Proper use of headings
    • Captions and audio description for video
    • No flashing content
    • Color not the only means of conveying information

Why are we talking about digital accessibility?

Ethical, Diversity, equity, and inclusion, Security/privacy, Good business… and it’s a civil right!

  • There are about 200 million active websites in the world (a little over 1 billion total) and more added every minute
  • Of the top million homepages, 95.9% have accessibility barriers (WebAIM 2024)
    • Down from 97.8% 5 years ago
  • Average of 56.8 errors per page
    • Up from 50 in 2023
  • Number of pages with fewer errors has increased while the number of pages with many errors has also increased.