New Tool From Wix Helps Improve Website Accessibility

One billion folks around the globe make the most of accessibility options to navigate the web.

Yet in terms of making our web sites accessible, many people are left scratching our heads.

How do you start to investigate your website to make sure it may be loved by completely everyone?

With the launch of the Accessibility Wizard from Wix, firms can often scan their web sites for points and resolve them in mere minutes.

What Does Accessibility For Websites Mean?

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) measures an internet site’s accessibility primarily based on whether or not customers can readily understand, perceive, navigate and work together with the area.

Google clarify accessibility as:

Is Accessibility A Legal Requirement?

Website accessibility laws, insurance policies, pointers, guidelines, and rules differ from nation to nation.

For instance, the US operates beneath the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA).

Whereas the UK refers back to the Equality Act 2010.

However, the WCAG 2.0 Level AA guideline is essentially the most broadly used commonplace globally, together with inside the ADA.

Wix’s Accessibility Wizard

Historically, Wix has created guides and sources to assist its customers perceive and resolve accessibility points and automate as a lot as attainable for ease of use.

The Accessibility Wizard is its newest try at making the complete course of so simple as attainable for its customers.

The instrument is manually triggered to scan the complete website and is accessed from the backend of any reside or drafted web page.

The wizard identifies any points and prompts the person to repair flagged issues with an easy-to-follow description inside the wizard, normally by clicking a button, adjusting a slider, or including alt textual content.

The accessibility points that may be resolved inside the wizard embrace:

• Alt textual content.
• Color distinction.
• Site language setting to match the content material language.
• Visual indicators.
• “Skip to content material” button.
• Single foremost heading.
• No skipped headings.
• Meaningful web page names.

Some points can’t be resolved inside the Wix Accessibility Wizard, reminiscent of:

• Link textual content.
• Text within the picture.
• Use of coloration.
• Zoomed content material.
• Accessibility assertion and media options.

However, the instrument does hyperlink to quite a few sources to assist the person resolve these points themselves.

Once the verify is full, the instrument scans the location once more to make sure nothing was damaged or no extra points had been created earlier than prompting the person to publish their modifications.

Whose Job Is It To Ensure Full Web Accessibility?

When contemplating web site accessibility, I admit that I at all times assumed it was the accountability of the net dev division.

According to Wix and Google, it reaches additional than that.

When I requested Nir Horesh, the Head of Accessibility at Wix, concerning the group he heads up, his reply stunned me.

After praising his direct group, he went on to inform me that the complete firm was a part of his wider group, together with:

• Web devs.
• Project managers.
• Designers.
• Content writers.

If any group member at Wix touches the location, they’ve a accountability in direction of making certain full accessibility.

And it appears Google agrees.

They have published guides to assist folks in several roles improve their website accessibility; furthering the purpose that the accountability doesn’t fall solely on the dev group:

Why All Companies Should Review Their Website’s Accessibility

While there’s an overlap between website accessibility and SEO, anybody engaged on an internet site ought to perceive that the follow goes deeper than growing rankings.

It is our ethical and moral responsibility to make sure that everyone has entry to the wealth of knowledge accessible on-line and has a constructive expertise when doing so.

Additional Reading And Sources:

W3C
Google Web Fundamentals: Accessibility
What Are The Levels of WCAG Compliance?
Wix accessibility