Effective routes to AA web accessibility for corporate websites

Accessibility is a committed journey to meeting and then maintaining an agreed standard.

A website that meets standards on day one may quickly fall short if you don’t embed accessible design into your company culture and operations.

Accessibility encompasses technical aspects of your website, such as font size and colour contrast. It also includes less obvious elements like user journeys, content structure and even the words you use.

There isn’t a single tool that will tell you that your website is accessible.

Tools can tell you where technical aspects fail but not whether an entire journey makes sense when navigated via a screen reader or keyboard. It is essential, therefore, to use tools and manual checks to audit your website.

In the UK, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), is the go-to standard for website accessibility.

There are 78 criteria and three levels of compliance: A, AA and AAA. Most companies aim for AA as it is above basic but more achievable than AAA.

You decide whether your website makes the grade rather than an external governing body assessing it for you. So, claiming the AA standard without continually adhering to the guidelines carries reputational risk.

For some companies, AA compliance is necessary. These organisations need to make changes more quickly than others.

With this approach, the work is done upfront to bring your website up to standard. Once it reaches the required level, monthly auditing ensures continuous compliance.

1.   Site-wide audit: A comprehensive audit of your website using automated tools and manual checks. This WCAG quick reference guide provides an overview of the audit.

2.   Roadmap development: Create a plan of action based on the audit to bring all aspects of your website up to AA standard within your desired timeframe.

3.   Audit calendar: Monthly auditing ensures new additions meet accessibility requirements.

4.   Train the marketing team: Remember, accessibility includes how you present content, so training your creators is essential to maintaining standards.

Unless there are specific contractual reasons why you must meet AA standards today, there are more practical ways to go on the same journey without the constant pressure of auditing.

This approach breaks the journey into manageable steps that compound over time, making the jump to compliance smaller in the future.

It begins with an accessibility statement, which is a public declaration of your intent and commitment to providing accessible digital services.

1.   Create an accessibility statement: This statement usually lives in the website footer and can include a roadmap and areas you will address in the future. It should also provide users with a contact or an alternative way of accessing content if needed. Use this WCAG tool to write an accessibility statement.

2.   Use automated tools to fix technical issues: We use an AI-powered tool called accessiBe to resolve technical problems automatically. What we particularly like about this tool is that end-users can customise web aspects such as colour contrast and font size.

3.   Embrace an accessible design culture: Work with your marketers, designers and developers to integrate accessible design into your day-to-day practices.  

4.   Ensure any new additions to the site are designed and built to AA standards: There’s no need to wait for your website to be ‘fixed’ before making new content accessible. Starting now will make meeting AA accessibility easier in the future, should you wish to claim it.

If a new website is an option, building from scratch means you can deploy new design methods that bake accessibility in from the beginning.

A design system is a codified library of templates and assets bespoke to a website.

Designers and coders build pages from an agreed library of AA-compliant components. Any changes to the library go through sign-off, ensuring all changes comply with accessibility standards.

Intrinsic design refers to how individual components behave across different screen sizes.

With this method, components scale independently and proportionately. For example, when a user changes the font size components scale, preventing content from being cut off, which is more likely with other design methods.

An intrinsic design system will take care of technical accessibility at the start and ongoing, meaning you need only worry about producing well-structured content.

Accessibility is a legal and moral obligation, with an estimated 16.1 million people in the UK living with a permanent disability and many more with temporary disabilities. Attending to accessibility also makes websites easier to use for everyone.

We can help you to:

• Audit your website and create a development roadmap
•  Fix accessibility issues
• Build a new website using an intrinsic design system that’s AA-compliant

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