How to Make Your Website Accessible to Everyone

Scrolling through a website, selecting a drop-down menu, and ordering a product—it’s not the same routine for all your customers. For millions of Americans with disabilities, navigating the Internet requires the help of assistive technologies that adjust page settings such as text size, color, contrast, and keyboard navigation to make websites easier to read. Blind and partially sighted users rely on accessibility tools such as screen readers that read text aloud through a speech synthesizer or braille display.

Artificial intelligence based web accessibility software called Overlays is marketed as an automated solution to ensure your website is usable and compliant with federal laws. All you have to do is install a widget and the software will do the work for you – it continuously scans for inaccessible code and updates it automatically.

However, disability advocates and accessibility experts say these applications often make websites difficult to use. Users describe AI-powered overlays as superfluous at best. At worst, the programs can render websites virtually unusable by interfering with assistive technology. In 2021, more than 700 web developers and accessibility advocates signed an open letter urging companies to stop using overlays. Also, a 2021 survey conducted by WebAIM, a non-profit accessibility organization, found that more than two-thirds of industry professionals said these products were not effective.

Lucy Greco, a web accessibility evangelist at the University of California, Berkeley, first heard about overlays around 2013 when they were offered as a one-line-of-code solution. By 2020, the industry was all about AI. “From the start, they were very disruptive and caused far more problems than they solved,” says Greco, who is blind and has studied accessibility issues for decades. “It wasn’t about fixing things, but more importantly, destroying things.”

The problem isn’t the AI ​​itself. The technology can be an effective tool to assist developers or point out bugs like unlabeled graphics. The problems arise when relying on algorithms to fix errors that require human intervention — like determining the appropriate alt text for an image. Karl Grove, Level Access’s chief innovation officer, has spent two decades advising major corporations and the federal government on accessibility issues. In his work on superposition research, he saw AI describe a product image as a woman in a dress on an e-commerce site. Nothing about the design of the clothes. Not very helpful to a buyer. “Unfortunately, they don’t deliver,” he says.

Here are three tips on how to make sure your website is accessible to everyone.

Businesses with inaccessible websites risk missing out on a large segment of the population, since 12.7 percent of people in the US live with a disability, according to the US Census Bureau. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put the estimate even higher, at one in four, or 61 million Americans. Just as stores and restaurants must ensure their physical locations can accommodate people with disabilities, as required by the Americans with Disabilities Act, businesses must also ensure their digital presence is compliant as well.

According to law firm Seyfarth Shaw, the number of lawsuits related to website accessibility has more than tripled in the last five years. This rapid rise has placed an undue focus on ADA compliance over ease of use and accelerated the adoption of AI as a defense against potential claims. “It’s kind of a perfect storm,” says Grove.

Still, industry experts warn against approaching accessibility only as a shield against lawsuits. If you want to grow your business by reaching the largest possible number of people online, you need an easy-to-use website. Inaccessible websites not only shut out the disabled community – they are often the most difficult for any consumer to navigate. Whether you can see the screen or use a mouse, it’s the same features that define your user experience. Is the homepage clean and easily navigable, or cluttered and crowded with ads?

“The site that you think is the hardest to use and understand is probably inaccessible,” says Greco. “You can have a 100 percent compliant website that’s still inaccessible,” she says.

There is no one-time solution to making your website accessible. The most cost-effective tool for creating and maintaining an accessible website is a knowledgeable programmer. When business owners prioritize disability from the start, it’s a much more cost-effective investment, says Greco. Many popular CMS platforms like WordPress, Drupal, and Shopify can be accessed out of the box, Grove notes.

Her advice to finding the right web developer: ask about their disability experience. “If a person doesn’t know what the W3C guidelines are,” she says, referring to international web standards, “they may not be the right person to hire them.”

Grove suggests hiring a web developer with an IAAP certification, awarded by the International Association of Accessibility Professionals. Still, he warns that the industry standard “isn’t a guarantee either.” “It’s really, really hard these days to find out if a person knows what they’re doing,” especially for small businesses, he admits. So take your time to hire the right developer.

One of the most effective ways to ensure your site is accessible is to reach out to the people who know the topic best. For this reason, entrepreneurs should seek advice from the disability community. Most cities have local service organizations dedicated to helping people with disabilities. Greco recommends contacting these organizations, which can help find people with different disabilities, to test your web content and serve as a focus group.

Even for a small business, these tests can be very inexpensive, says Greco, who estimates a typical price of around $150 per 90 minutes. “It’s not such a onerous price, given the value of the effort you’re getting from people.”