Hand-Cursor auf einer Accessibility-Taste

I remember saying in my first presentations and workshops on accessibility: It’s a nice extra when you can adjust the font size or colors on your website. But this has little to do with real web accessibility.

Widgets are no substitute for accessibility measures

The same is true today for accessibility widgets. These widgets are an “overlay”. As soon as you click on the accessibility icon, the control window opens, or a popup appears over the content. In this window, you can then adapt the presentation and operation of the website to your needs.

These kinds of widgets are nice-to-have but are no substitute for technical, visual, and content measures to make a website accessible.

Screenshot Accessibility-Widget von userway

Why a widget alone is not enough

For a website to be accessible, the content must be perceivable, usable, understandable, and robust according to the four principles of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines WCAG 2.1.

These widgets can support perceptibility: Users can increase color contrast, adjust the font size, or visually highlight focused elements. The latter is very helpful, for example, when someone jumps from link to link using the Tab key. Without visual highlighting, users quickly lose their orientation.

Some of these widgets also add alternative text to the images. This is done using artificial intelligence (AI).

With these individual adjustments, the widget covers many needs – but by no means all of them.

To whom the Accessibility widget is useless

People with disabilities often use their assistive technologies, such as screen reader software but also another input device instead of mouse and keyboard.

The widgets often offer alternatives and improvements for blind and visually impaired people. But they have their screen reader or a screen enlarger.

These users do not need the widget. What they need is a universal design and a working technique that doesn’t interfere with their software or assistive technologies.

Nevertheless, accessibility widgets do have their justification for existence.

For whom the widget is useful

I must admit: When I talk about blind and visually impaired users, I often see technology-oriented people in front of me, such as my colleague René. But of course, not everyone is as proficient with computers or smartphones as he is.

Less proficient users usually do not know how to adjust the font size directly in the operating system or browser. Or there are people with a visual impairment who are not yet considered visually impaired and do not have access to the often expensive programs such as ZoomText.

For these people, the widget can be useful because they can customize everything directly on your website to make the content easy to read and use for them.

So as long as accessibility widgets do not interfere with their assistive technologies, they can be quite useful and a good addition.

However, you should not be too sure about having an accessible website just by using a widget.

Widgets lead to false security

Most providers of such widgets advertise with terms like “WCAG-compliant” or “ADA Compliance”. ADA stands for “The Americans with Disabilities Act” and is the current law in the USA that prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities.

With these promises, the providers create the impression: Whoever installs the widget automatically has an accessible website. Which is wrong.

In Switzerland, the chances are low that someone will sue you if your website is not accessible and excludes people with disabilities. The situation is entirely different in the U.S. The numbers of lawsuits, court cases, and fines are increasing.

But regardless of whether you risk a lawsuit with a non-accessible website or not: With an accessible website you do not exclude anyone and thus reach more potential customers.

Accessibility widgets to support other optimizations

If you read my blog posts regularly, you will probably already be familiar with this. And yet I can’t repeat myself often enough: To make a website sustainably barrier-free, it is crucial to consider the criteria from the beginning.

For the reasons mentioned above, it is not enough to simply install a widget once your website is online. Here are a few criteria that you should consider at the beginning and that no widget in the world can do for you:

When designing, make sure that you adhere to standard conventions.

Pay attention to sufficient contrasts.

Implement the two senses principle. A few examples: Add alternative texts to images. Provide videos with subtitles or transcriptions of the spoken content. Add audio descriptions to videos.

And during the implementation, but also after going live: testing, testing, testing. Testing is not only crucial during a pandemic, but also for your accessibility project.

If you are aware of the limitations of these accessibility widgets and manually optimize your website for accessibility, these widgets are a good addition.

Screenshot Vorlesefunktion von Equalweb

Major differences among the providers

There are significant differences between the providers in terms of both costs and functions. Some free widgets are equipped with minimal features; the additional features are then available for an additional charge. Some do nothing more than placing a widget on the website, while others use AI to fix any accessibility issues automatically.

As for WCAG compliance, the fewer features a widget offers, the less you can expect in terms of accessibility. With providers like Userway and Adally, I feel that free widgets are more of a marketing tool to reach potential customers.

There is better compliance with paid products, such as those from Equalweb, avtec, Max Access, and accessiBe.

When choosing a widget, it is essential to make sure that the widget itself is accessible. You might think that is obvious. However, a short test of the different widgets shows that not all are equally easy to use.

With Equalweb, for example, I came across the following problem: Using the keyboard, I was able to activate the read-aloud function. Afterward, a player opened, which can also be operated with the keyboard. However, it was no longer possible for me to open the widget again to disable the read-aloud function. Enabling and disabling should be possible at any time by using the keyboard alone.

Are you interested in adding a widget to your website? I would be happy to help you find the right widget. Book a free consultation with me now.

The post Accessibility widgets: How accessible are websites using them? appeared first on Precision Global Marketing.

This need stems from website owners’ fears of increasing accessibility lawsuits. The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) affirmed that websites and apps are considered places of public accommodation. Hence, laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act that have provisions that require accessibility are now considered applicable to these digital channels as well.

Last year, the US Supreme Court also upheld a decision of its lower court that ruled in favor of a blind man who sued Domino’s Pizza. The plaintiff claimed that he was not able to use the pizza chain’s website and mobile app and that the company was therefore in violation of the ADA.

Many others are following suit, filing cases against companies using similar grounds. Noncompliant businesses can get fined $55,000 to $75,000 for their first violation according to the ADA. Simply dealing with suits can already cost them just as much in legal fees.

Clearly, site owners have to do something to address the issue.

How Free Tools Fall Short

As a quick fix, some site owners have turned toward free tools and plugins that claim to make sites accessible. It’s pretty understandable why site owners would rely on these. They don’t cost a thing, and they’re pretty quick to install or integrate. If you’re a WordPress user, for instance, you can simply search for several free available accessibility plugins that you can install with just a few clicks.

To be fair, these plugins do improve accessibility in some ways. Some plugins add panels or widgets with functionalities that allow users to tweak visual elements including the ability to change fonts, alignment, spacing, colors, and contrast. Visually impaired users can adjust these settings in order to make site content more readable to suit their particular disability.

However, these free plugins actually fall short of what’s required by law to be considered compliant. Thus, relying solely on these plugins still exposes site owners to potential lawsuits.

The DOJ references the Level AA success criteria of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as to what must be met to achieve compliance. These criteria require implementing specific functionalities to ensure that a wide range of people with disabilities are able to access these sites.

These are just beyond what these free tools offer. The visual tweaks that plugins allow are a minor part of these requirements. To meet the remaining parts, sites must also feature keyboard navigation, screen reader optimization, and proper tagging of images and form labels, among others.

In addition, these plugins can give site owners a false sense of security. For now, the only way to guarantee a strong defense against ADA lawsuits is for sites to demonstrate that they really do adhere to the WCAG.

How to Achieve Compliance

Designers play a crucial role in improving web accessibility. Design improvements and new functionalities are clearly needed to be implemented for compliance. Here are some ways designers can help make websites become more accessible:

Get familiar with the WCAG

In order to know what changes need to be made to websites, we should be familiar with the WCAG and its principles. The four main design principles are:

Perceivable: Can the information contained on a page be perceived by users with different disabilities?

Operable: Is the interface simple enough for disabled users to navigate and interact with?

Understandable: Is the content clear and understandable and does the site help users avoid mistakes by being predictable and intuitive?

Robust: Can the site be used with current and future technologies such as screen readers and other assistive devices?

It’s good to dive deep into the success criteria as well. For example, Level AA success criteria contain provisions such as the recommended contrast ratio between the text and the background. Level AA requires at least 4.5 to 1 depending on the font size. These details can essentially serve as a designer’s checklist for things to incorporate into the design.

Design with accessibility in mind

Designing with an accessibility-first mindset allows you to provide a solid base for site owners to continue compliance. With a compliant design, administrators and content developers only need to work on adding compliant content. This is much better than having to audit and remediate an already live website.

By knowing the various success criteria, it’s also easier to map out a user interface that takes these into consideration. You can readily avoid pitfalls such as solely relying on images to communicate text information. While it’s still possible to make use of images for buttons, the WCAG requires that these functional images have appropriate alt-texts. As an alternative, designers can simply use markup and styles to create buttons.

You should also consider how you call attention to certain behaviors. Often, we rely on visual cues. For example, an input field’s outline can change to red to indicate a validation error in the input. Simply relying on color can make it difficult for color blind users to recognize. Instead, designers can add other cues such as labels or instructions to indicate the error.

Help in auditing and remediation

Active sites that aren’t initially designed for accessibility need to undergo auditing and remediation. All site elements and content have to be reviewed for compliance. Unfortunately, most active sites can have hundreds or even thousands of pages of content, making auditing and remediation challenging.

It’s a good thing that most designers now adhere to the separation of concerns, so updating the design for accessibility may mean simply working changes to templates rather than adjusting styles for each page.

When done manually, auditing and remediation for complete compliance can take weeks or even months to accomplish. Fortunately, there are now efforts that leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate these processes. Designers and agencies looking to remediate multiple websites may want to look into such solutions.

Why Accessibility Matters

Considering how confrontational people have become these days, the threat of web accessibility lawsuits is very real. Site owners should commit to making their sites compliant. Most free tools actually fall short on what’s needed for sites to be considered compliant. Designers may be facing tough challenges when helping their clients out.

However, it’s also important to recognize why web accessibility truly matters. It’s about inclusion and making sure that people with disabilities — and there are about a billion of them around the world — get to use and enjoy the internet. So, instead of thinking that working toward accessibility can be quite the bother, consider your efforts as having a positive impact on the world. Designing for accessibility is doing the right thing.

The post Why Free Tools Just Aren’t Enough to Achieve Web Accessibility Compliance appeared first on Precision Global Marketing.

However, the landscape of the internet isn’t quite as forgiving for site owners. The lower barriers to site building means that others can also create their own with ease. Competition can be fierce. Site owners have to work hard to deliver unique content and real value to win their audiences and keep them coming back. Even cybersecurity is of great concern as hackers look to constantly prey on unsecure websites.

Primis Player Placeholder

If these weren’t enough, a new trend that many site owners now worry about is the rising threat of web accessibility lawsuits. In 2018, the Unites States Department of Justice (DOJ) affirmed that websites are considered places of public accommodation and must therefore be made accessible to people with disabilities as provided by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

This fueled parties to use the law to force websites to improve their accessibility. Last year, there were more than 11,000 ADA lawsuits filed in federal court on the grounds of accessibility of public accommodations. A study of the top one million home pages revealed that 98.1 percent had detectable accessibility failures and may therefore be subject to suit.

Essentially, the push for wider web accessibility is a good thing. As a site owner, one should allow everyone to enjoy what one offers—including people with disabilities. But considering how some people can be litigious, it may be prudent for you to work on web accessibility immediately. Otherwise, you might be dealing with a costly lawsuit.

Table of Contents

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1 The Issue with Free Accessibility Plugins

2 How to Achieve Compliance

3 Conclusion

The Issue with Free Accessibility Plugins

It’s easy to think that there should be some free solutions out there that instantly solve this problem. Various powerful web development tools are available for free. Open source content management systems (CMS) like WordPress and Joomla can be freely downloaded installed on a webhost with just a few clicks. These CMS even have entire libraries of free plugins and themes that extend their capabilities. Surely there must be solutions that solve the accessibility issue.

Well, there are several such tools. They usually come in the form of plugins, widgets, and toolbars, and can be readily integrated to popular CMS. These plugins add certain functionalities to websites such as features that allow users to change the font type, font size, and text and background colors to suit the users’ needs. Some even allow users to enlarge the cursor or highlight links. These features can be helpful for people with visual impairments. For example, people with certain types of color blindness can benefit from viewing websites with text that clearly contrasts to its background.

Unfortunately, these functionalities cover only a fraction of what’s actually needed for sites to be considered compliant. The DOJ points at the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and its Level AA success criteria as reference for what sites have to achieve. The WCAG includes preparing content so that it can be properly interpreted by screen readers and structuring the site for navigability.

These plugins do not implement such changes to web content and site structures. So, even if you use these plugins, your site really wouldn’t be compliant to the level needed that protects you from legal action.

Something more iffy about some of these plugins is that they upsell paid accessibility remediation services. They may offer to make your website “kind of” accessible “for free”, the companies actual business model is to sell you accessibility audits and manual accessibility work, with services that can run up to thousands of dollars. This means that these companies know that their free solution is not enough, and does not make your site accessible, or legally compliant.

How to Achieve Compliance

If these plugins fall short, how can you make your website standards-compliant?

To start, it’s important to understand what the WCAG contains. This way, you can reconcile what’s demanded by the guidelines with how your website is made. Many of the guidelines are pretty straightforward and identify which specific features and functionalities are needed. For example, images which are considered nontext content should have alt text tags that provide a description of the image. This makes the content “readable” to those using screen readers. To comply, you simply need to add alt texts to all the images that your site contains.

Recent additions to Level AA criteria in the WCAG’s most recent version (2.1) also provide guidelines for newer devices and trends such as advising against locking website styles based on a single display mode as devices can now have different orientations. Some guidelines might not even apply to your case. For instance, if your site doesn’t feature video content, then you wouldn’t need to meet provisions that require close captioning for video.

If you’re just starting out with your website, then working on accessibility should be easier. You would be able to accommodate various WCAG success criteria into your website’s design. If you happen to use a CMS, you can even use an accessibility-ready theme. Just be mindful of following the guidelines for any new content that you may be adding to your site. You can use the W3C’s markup validation service to check your HTML code and various other free accessibility evaluation tools. If you are commissioning a developer or hiring a design agency to set up your website for you, it’s important to make accessibility compliance a key requirement in your project.

Active websites that may have hundreds or thousands of pages of content are trickier to make accessible. If you happen to own one, you might need to get a team to work on compliance. Your site must be comprehensively audited to check for all elements that don’t meet the success criteria. Afterwards, you need to work on remediation to correct all deficiencies. This is why some services look to upsell you this service.

Fortunately, there are recent efforts that look to automate the auditing and remediation processes. Instead of relying on people to perform the work manually, artificial intelligence and machine learning are used to comprehensively check your website’s code and content and apply the necessary changes to achieve compliance.

Conclusion

Web accessibility should now be a priority for every site owner. The threat of getting sued for noncompliance should be a cause for worry, but doing the right thing is what matters more. Besides, many websites have still yet to work on compliance. Allowing people with disabilities the opportunity to access your content and services can even become your competitive edge.

There are various ways how you can go about compliance. While free tools are worth a try, just be mindful that they don’t quite meet what’s truly needed. You might even get drawn in by their upselling tactics and spend a significant sum on a manual audit and remediation service. Rather than risk it, it’s better to invest in the right effort to either make sure you build your website right or fix the accessibility issues of your existing one through a comprehensive and accurate remediation effort.

The post You Might Get What You Don’t Pay For with Free Web Accessibility Plugins appeared first on Precision Global Marketing.

Here are a few recent articles:

https://allerlay.com/accessibility-widgets-how-accessible-are-websites-using-them/

https://uxplanet.org/why-free-tools-just-arent-enough-to-achieve-web-accessibility-compliance-ba035aa3ad65

https://www.journaldev.com/40958/beware-free-web-accessibility-plugins-issues

https://smallbiztrends.com/2020/06/free-accessibility-plugins-problems.html

https://medium.com/@yarden.garber/free-accessibility-plugins-can-cost-you-a-lot-of-money-11d05b40114a

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/free-accessibility-plugins-can-cost-you-lot-money-yarden-garber/

https://www.journaldev.com/40958/beware-free-web-accessibility-plugins-issues

https://www.business2community.com/ecommerce/why-ecommerce-owners-cant-afford-the-cost-of-free-accessibility-plugins-02317552

In the past several months, we began to experience a massive number of clients reaching out with lawsuits despite, and sometimes in spite of (we’ll explain this in the following section) using an accessibility plugin. The vast majority of them are using the UserWay plugin or the WP Accessibility Plugin.

Many plugins are very tempting to use because they are free or very low cost and are simple to install. Also, it is easy to mistake them for a real solution, as their websites are often misleading, claiming to “enhance” accessibility and provide a “framework” for compliance. The problem is, well, they never did and probably never will be able to make your website compliant. Note that they also never vividly state that they will. Rather, they tiptoe around that. 

Of course, you have tried to do the right thing and enable people with disabilities to use your website, but unfortunately, these plugins are not a solution, and they expose your website to claims. We’ll cover exactly why in the next sections.

The biggest problem with these plugins, other than that people with disabilities need a genuine solution and these plugins are not it, is that not only do they not make your website compliant, but they make it a lawsuit magnet. These plugins are known to not really achieve compliance and are very recognizable on your site, making it an easy target for anybody who is testing it.

Why you need a real solution now, not later

The unfortunate reality is that while we try our hardest to help clients get out of lawsuits that derived from having a such a plugin, it is often too late. The major point that needs to be addressed here is that website owners need a real solution before they get sued, not after. Preferably, one that provides a support package in case of litigation, dedicated assistance, and proof of compliance, in case something does happen.

If you are currently using an accessibility plugin and you want to know where your website’s compliance status stands, test your website and get a clear answer within seconds here: https://ace.accessibe.com It is completely free and will help you learn where you stand.

Why web accessibility plugins can’t make your website compliant

To explain why these plugins don’t achieve compliance, we first need to briefly touch on how you achieve compliance in the first place. Web accessibility is a set of rules, behaviors and design guidelines, composed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as a meticulous set of instructions that is called the WCAG, or the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. These guidelines are internationally accepted and are adopted by almost all current legislation, including those in US courts.

To simplify the requirements, we’ll break them down into two categories:

Design and UI related adjustments – about 20% of the WCAG requirements relate to the UI and design of websites. From color contrasts to animations and even font-sizes.

Screen-reader and keyboard navigation adjustments – about 80% of the WCAG requirements relate to adjustments for:

Blind users – a screen-reader is a software that is installed on the operating system of the blind user (Windows/MAC/Android, etc.) and is what your website must be compatible with so that it is accessible.

Motor Impaired – people with motor impairments use only the keyboard to navigate and operate websites, and the requirements mandate that all functions that can be performed using a mouse, can also be performed using the keyboard only.

Accessibility plugins provide you with an “Accessibility Interface” that users can choose accessibility options from. Some provide better interfaces, others worse. But all interfaces, with no exceptions (including ours!), cover only the first category that is explained above. Meaning – only 20% of the overall requirements.

The vast majority of the accessibility requirements, screen reader and keyboard navigation adjustments are just way too complex for a plugin to cover. In all honesty, some of them do provide very minor keyboard navigation features like showing the keyboard focus. Still, these are not even remotely close to what is required by legislation, leaving your website wide open to complaints.

In today’s industry, there are only two ways to cover the keyboard navigation and screen reader adjustments, and therefore ensure full compliance for your website. The first is using our solution, accessiBe, which utilizes AI for remediating your accessibility failures and ensuring compliance with both the first and second categories of compliance by using an accessibility interface and AI, respectively. The other option is to hire an accessibility service company to code these adjustments manually in your template.

While plugins don’t make websites accessible to blind users, almost 100% of the lawsuits are issued by blind plaintiffs. Blind people often complain that the websites in question have not been made compatible with screen readers such as JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver, and TalkBack, and are therefore not usable by the blind and are not compliant with legislation.

UserWay specifically provides a built-in screen reader within its accessibility plugin. Although it may seem like an impressive feature, it is for marketing purposes only and is meant to make their plugin seem impressive. Screen readers are installed on the operating system, not on the website itself. Websites need to be compatible with them, rather than providing them. Think about it, if the blind user doesn’t use a screen-reader and needs UserWay’s, how did the user even reach the website in the first place? Or even open the browser on their computer? Screen readers enable blind users to use computers in general and are used right from the login screen of the operating system. Therefore, we can guarantee that virtually zero blind users have ever used UserWay’s or any other plugin’s built-in screen reader.

What you should  expect from your accessibility solution provider

First and foremost, a good accessibility provider will inevitably attend to clients who receive a demand letter on their watch. We encourage you to reach out to your current accessibility solution provider and ask how they assist in such a situation.

Second, you need to be certified. Ask for documentation supporting that your website is indeed compliant with your solution of choice. If you went with a proper solution, you’d probably receive such documentation. But surely, you don’t expect these plugins to certify or support you in case of litigation.

Lastly, we want to help you ensure that you don’t install a solution that is lacking or will expose you to litigation. To do that, we have prepared a Table of Features that covers just 10 accessibility requirements out of hundreds. 

We advise that you send this table to your current accessibility provider, so they can tell you genuinely, what they cover, and what they don’t. We can almost guarantee that if you are using such a plugin, you’ll get back an almost empty table or excuses. And, again, these are just 10 requirements out of hundreds (!).

# Requirement Category Covered?

1 The keyboard focus moves to within a popup right when it appears Keyboard Navigation Yes/No

2 Popups and dropdowns can be closed using the Esc key Keyboard Navigation Yes/No

3 The keyboard focus loop within a popup or a dropdown and doesn’t let it escape Keyboard Navigation Yes/No

4 Failed form submissions move the keyboard focus directly to the error. Keyboard Navigation Yes/No

5 Quick navigation/skip links are provided to help users skip blocks, sections, and pages. For example, to quickly focus on the navigation, the footer, or the main content of the website Keyboard Navigation Yes/No

6 Popups are being described to screen-readers using aria-modal=true and role=dialog Screen-reader Yes/No

7 All menus are tagged for screen-readers using role=navigation or the nav tag, and dropdowns are tagged for screen-readers using aria-haspopup=true, and their dynamic state is announced using aria-expanded=true/false Screen-reader Yes/No

8 Deleted prices, bold and emphasized texts that are visually decorated using CSS are tagged appropriately to screen-readers Screen-reader Yes/No

9 Images receive Alt attributes describing both the objects and the text that is embedded within them Screen-reader Yes/No

10 All form fields receive a proper field description using a connected label or an aria-label Screen-reader Yes/No

Okay, so that was our say! Hopefully, this post was helpful for you and we were able to shed some light on what is going on in the industry and why so many articles pop up against these plugins nowadays.

We do, of course, understand that small businesses cannot pay thousands of dollars for compliance, so they sometimes turn to such solutions in hopes of making it through okay. In this situation, doing so is much more harmful than it is beneficial.

One of the reasons we created accessiBe is to be able to provide website owners with a full solution, that is affordable for any business. accessiBe is a solution that achieves a win-win for both your business and for people with disabilities. You achieve compliance and your business is protected from litigation, while people with disabilities can browse through and use your website effectively.

If $490/year is a price that your business still cannot afford, please contact us and we’ll try to help as much as we can. Just don’t expose yourself to tens of thousands of dollars of potential litigation and put your business at risk.

accessiBe is the web accessibility market leader that is trusted by tens of thousands of small businesses and industry-leading enterprises alike. We have helped thousands of businesses with their litigations, and we’ll be happy to help you achieve compliance too. 

The post Using a plugin like UserWay? You are at risk of litigation appeared first on Precision Global Marketing.