WCAG - Is your website accessible to everyone?

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Is your website accessible to everyone? The answer to this question seems simple: “Yes, everyone can access it,” although the situation may not be as trivial as it seems. In today's post, we will focus on the topic of digital accessibility and WCAG guidelines, something that most of us do not deal with on a daily basis, but is extremely important for the functioning of our website on the web.

Digital Accessibility, What Is It?
Digital accessibility is a set of principles and practices that should be applied to all websites in order to be considered universally accessible to every user. Digital accessibility principles are established not only to enable and facilitate the reception of websites by standard users, but above all, they emphasize the adaptation of the displayed content for older people, people with disabilities or neuroatypical people .

These rules may often seem too strict, but let's remember that we should ensure equal access to information and content for all users, regardless of their abilities.

It is also worth knowing that digital accessibility, although it aims to adapt websites for people with limited abilities, can also bring us significant benefits in terms of positioning and conversions . This is because Google pays a lot of attention to whether a given page complies with the WCAG guidelines and takes this into account when indexing and positioning the page.

What is WCAG
WCAG, what does it mean?
WCAG , or Web Content Accessibility Guidelines , means a set of guidelines that panama phone numbers determine the accessibility of websites. This set says how websites should be created and designed so that their content is accessible to every user, regardless of their limitations or disabilities.

WCAG rules
4 Basic WCAG Principles
Perception
The content presented on the website should be accessible to the user's senses. It sounds quite basic, but when we consider that the recipients of our website may be people with visual or hearing disabilities, it is worth considering again.

Elements such as the following may be crucial for fulfilling the principle of perceptibility:

Adding alternative texts for images (alt text)
Adding captions and transcripts for multimedia
Ensuring sufficient colour contrast between the background and important elements on the page
Functionality
The user interface and all navigation elements must be clear and legible enough for all users to use them. We must definitely take into account people with limited mobility who use only a keyboard, without a mouse.

Elements such as the following may be crucial to fulfilling the functionality principle:

Designing an alternative keyboard-only navigation
Avoid flashing elements. According to WCAG rules, elements flashing 3 times per second or more can cause epileptic seizures
Appropriate, adequate naming for links and buttons
Intelligibility
The content and elements presented on the website should be legible and understandable to everyone and not cause confusion.

Elements such as the following may be crucial to meeting the principle of intelligibility:

Clear site navigation and instructions. Users should easily understand how to navigate and use the site.
Make the page predictable. Interactive elements on our page should trigger expected interaction.
Providing assistance in completing forms
Solidity
Website content should be robust enough to be read and interpreted by various types of assistive technologies, such as screen readers.

Elements such as the following may be crucial to meeting the principle of solidity:

Coding the page in accordance with current standards of programming languages, such as HTML
Maintaining proper semantics in coding, such as proper use of HTML tags
Regularly conduct accessibility testing on various devices and resolutions.
There are of course many more rules and guidelines. The entire WCAG documentation can be found on the official website:

WCAG Page Rating
Your page is being rated
Each website, depending on its level of digital accessibility, is rated: A, AA or AAA.

level A - this is the basic level of accessibility, to achieve it, it is enough to meet the minimum conditions, such as adding alternative texts for images or providing transcription. Failure to meet this level may mean that your website will not be legible for people with disabilities.
Level AA - the average level of digital accessibility. To achieve this result, your website should be adapted for most people with disabilities, i.e. have a sufficient level of contrast, clear navigation and substantive and technological support for people with disabilities.
AAA level - this is the highest level of accessibility. To obtain the AAA score, the most rigorous requirements must be met, such as the use of simplified language or the complete elimination of flashes that can trigger epileptic seizures. For most websites, this level is almost impossible to achieve, and these requirements are usually used on specialist portals aimed at people with disabilities.
Accessibility Policy
Basic principles of accessibility in practice
Color contrast
Maintaining adequate contrast between the background and elements on the page is extremely important so that people with visual impairments, such as color blindness or presbyopia, can use your site freely.

WCAG recommends a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for body text, and 3:1 for large text and headings. There are many tools online that will allow us to check the contrast ratio between selected colors.

Alt text for images
Alternative text, or alt text, is a short description of an image that is presented on a web page. Adding such text will allow blind and visually impaired people to obtain information about the image's content using a screen reader.

Alt text should be short, concise, and accurately represent the important elements of the images.