Users with disabilities are visiting your website

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It’s getting increasingly difficult to track how users are finding your website, but there is one thing I can guarantee — users with disabilities are visiting your site, and you should be prepared to serve them accordingly.

I was talking with a (now former) client a few years ago, urging her to do more work to make her website more accessible. Her response was sad and ignorant, saying:

“I am all about helping the disabled maneuver through a website, but that is not my audience. The people I attract are not disabled.”

To be honest, I’m not sure exactly what she meant by that, but she was clearly mistaken. Not only are 10-15% of all internet users disabled to some degree, we all have other issues from time to time that make accessibility on a website even more important.

It’s essential to know your audience and serve them well, and ignoring this aspect of your audience can be a little rude, short-sighted, and expensive if you ever get sued.

Don’t question whether or not users with disabilities are visiting your website. They are, so put in the effort to serve them properly.

We all have accessibility needs

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Website accessibility is something I’ve shared a lot about. We’ve written about it on the GreenMellen blog, devoted a podcast episode to it, and there are a handful of posts on here as well. Polishing up the accessibility of your website is a great thing, and makes it so all users can consume the content on your site.

However, when we talk about making websites more accessible, most people think about making it accessible for “those other people that need it“. That’s true much of the time, but we’ve all had accessibility concerns to various degrees of the years.

The image below from Microsoft shows that we all have situations come up where accessibility is important.

We tend to think of accessibility in the “permanent” column, which is potentially the most important, but I think all of us have been in multiple situations in the “temporary” and “situational” columns where properly accessible websites have been a benefit to us.

Making your website fully accessible is a great way to help rank higher on Google and avoid lawsuits, but the best benefit is making so that all of your visitors can consume your content, regardless of any type of accessibility issue that they might have.

If you need help with this on your site, certainly feel free to reach out to us.

Does accessibility help your website rank higher?

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Online accessibility has become an important topic over the past few years. I’ve shared some tips on how you can improve accessibility on your site, and this short podcast offers a few more bits of advice.

The question is — does Google reward your site for being accessible? The short answer is “no”, but the longer answer is a bit more nuanced.

Google’s John Mueller put it this way (via SE Journal):

“No, not really. So I think accessibility is something that is important for a website because, if you drive your users away with a website that they can’t use, then they’re not going to recommend it to other people.

But it’s not something that we would pick up and use as a direct ranking factor when it comes to search. Maybe that will change over time. ”

He’s not wrong. At this time, Google doesn’t measure and rank sites based on their level of accessibility. However, many of things that you need to work on to help with accessibility will also tend to help with your rankings in Google.

A site that loads quickly, doesn’t bury text in images, uses proper alt text, and makes good use of headings will accomplish both areas. Sites like that will be more accessible, but they’ll also tend to rank better.

Accessibility won’t be a bonus for your rankings in and of itself, but spending the time to do it right will have secondary benefits for you, and your users will absolutely appreciate it.

Going beyond accessibility to reduce motion

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Building websites that are accessible to all users is something that continues to be a problem on much of the web, but it’s continuing to improve over time. For most sites, some simple steps will get you going in the right direction and put you ahead of most other sites in helping users with disabilities consume your content.

However, there is more that can be done. If you have a site with heavy animation on it, you can do things to help users that have problems with motion on sites, whether it leads to sickness or even seizures. The relatively new “Media Queries Level 5” specifications that came out last year have a solution specifically for this called ‘prefers-reduced-motion’.

The code for it is pretty simple, as it only has two options:

  • ‘reduce’
  • ‘no-preference’

If the user has no-preference, the website will load normally. However, if their computer is sending the ‘reduce’ directive to your site, you can choose to change how motion behaves. Digging into that code is beyond the scope of this post, but Michelle Barker at Smashing Magazine has an excellent post that digs into some simple examples.

Users

With that out of the way, it’s worth looking at the other side. If you’re a user, how do you specify that you want websites to hear your request for ‘prefers-reduced-motion’? When digging into this, I suspected it would be a setting that you adjust in your web browser, but it turns out that it’s setting you change in your operating system.

  • In Windows 10: Settings > Ease of Access > Display > Show animations in Windows.
  • In macOS: System Preferences > Accessibility > Display > Reduce motion.

I don’t suspect many websites will support this for a while, and many others (like this one) don’t have a need to at all. Still, if you’re building a site with a lot of interactive pieces on it, I recommend you check this out and make some small changes to help out those users that specifically request fewer animations.

Spot the imposter

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When dealing with a professional of any kind, you expect that they know the lingo. For example, I’m not very knowledgeable about how a car works, but if I’m talking to a mechanic and I mention that I think I might have an issue with my transmission, and he responds with “what’s a transmission?”, I know I’m in trouble.

Here are four that I see quite often, and each makes me question things a little bit.

Banks that require password changes

Our bank requires us to change our password every 90 days, yet they can offer no good reason for it. Both Microsoft and the FTC have said that such changes are silly to enforce, which makes me question the security that the bank offers.

Our bank talks a lot about how secure they are, but doing this kind of “security theatre” erodes a lot of trust.

An SEO expert that says “alt tags”

When describing an image for vision-impaired users, “alt attributes” are essential. For a normal user, if they say “alt tags”, we know what they mean. For a web professional (particularly one that focuses on SEO, where these are crucial), there is a big difference between an “attribute” and a “tag”, and they should know better.

An accessibility expert that uses #lowercasehashtags

This is another one that is acceptable (though ideally will change) when normal users do it, but for those that claim to work hard for the sake of accessibility, it’s a bad one.

We should all be using #CamelCaseHashtags, but if you’re big into accessibility issues, you already knew that.

Any web company that puts their link in the footer of sites that they build

This is just a scummy thing to do, as it hurts the rankings of your site and helps the rankings of the company that stuck their link down there. As I’ve mentioned before, there are only two reasons that a company would do this:

  1. They don’t know any better, in which case you should be nervous as they don’t know how Google works.
  2. Worse, they do know better, and they’re stealing your rankings on purpose.

Neither one is a good answer.

Nobody is perfect, and I suspect plenty of people will keep using lowercase hashtags, just as I’ll likely keep asking dumb questions to my mechanic. They’re the expert, so as long as they know what a transmission does I won’t be immediately concerned.

Don’t break the back button

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Over the years, the “back” button on web browsers has consistently been shown to be one of the most-used features on a web browser. As time as gone on, though, websites have found increasingly creative ways to break that core functionality.

The folks at the Baymard Institute have showed four design patterns that violate what users expect when they press “back”, and their research shows that 59% of websites make these mistakes.

There are simple ways to help with this, such as not having links open in new tabs (which also helps with accessibility), but Baymard’s list goes a lot deeper.

Their list consists of:

  1. Overlays & Lightboxes (37% of sites don’t do this)
  2. Filtering & Sorting (27% of Sites Don’t Do This)
  3. Accordion Checkouts
  4. Returning to the Product List from the Product Page

I encourage you to check out their full article to learn more about each of those and how to keep your site as user-friendly as possible.

They’re never called “alt tags”

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When working to make your website more accessible, one area to work on is adding alternative attributes to images. This text is what vision-impaired users will hear as a representation of the image (and it’s useful to Google as well), so it’s worth doing right.

Using WordPress, for example, you can simply click an image in your editor and enter the alt text in a box on the right side of the screen. Other systems tend to make it equally simple.

You can call those items “alt attributes” or “alt text”, but they really shouldn’t be called “alt tags”, though they often are.

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Why not?

First, it’s fairly sloppy. When it comes to websites, “attributes” are one thing and “tags” are another. Alt text is not a “tag” in any sense of the word. Let’s be accurate.

You may argue that if someone says “alt tags” we know what they’re referring to, and you’re correct, but that can lead to confusion in other areas.

Title Tags

Some years ago, I was co-teaching a class on Search Engine Optimization, and the topic of “title tags” came up. The “title” in HTML is interesting, because you can have a single title “tag” for a page, but then also have a variety of title “attributes” on a page. You can probably see where this is going.

As we were unpacking questions about how to best optimize title tags (of which each page can have just one), some users were confused because “you can add a title tag to many elements” — but you can’t. You can add a title attribute to various elements, but only one title tag on a page.

Does it really matter?

At the end of day, the difference is really kind of pedantic. However, we’re professionals, so let’s use the right terminology and try not to confuse things any more than they already are.

Website Accessibility: Help your users, help your rankings

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Yesterday at the A Brighter Web Meetup, we had a great discussion about website accessibility, why it’s important, and steps to take to get started.

You can download the slides as a PDF, or view them all here:

You can also check out this post for some tips to get you started on making your site work better for everyone.

If you need further help with website accessibility, don’t hesitate to contact us and we’ll be happy to assist.

Some things are worse in order to get better

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Some things come along that just don’t make sense at first. A good example is the digital camera — the first ones took nearly unrecognizable pictures, and even early consumer models took very poor quality pictures compared to traditional cameras.

You could look at it one of two ways:

  1. My normal camera is way better than this.
  2. Yes, but these will be better than my old camera as the technology grows up.

These days, most of us carry a camera in our pocket that is far superior to any camera that the generation before us could get their hands on.

You can follow this line of thinking to other technology-focused items, like electric cars, but it applies to learning too.

Keyboard shortcuts

A mentioned a few days ago how I used the web for an hour without a mouse. It was largely to appreciate how impaired users are forced to browse, but also to improve my own use of keyboard shortcuts.

When you first start learning keyboard shortcuts, they’re mostly silly. It’s way faster to just use the mouse to accomplish the same thing. And you’re right — until you’re wrong. Over time, learning a healthy number of keyboard shortcuts will almost certainly save you a great deal of time.

As you saw in my “no mouse” post, some things are just hard to do without a mouse, so I’m not suggesting you rid yourself of it entirely. Just be sure to things like keyboard shortcuts a fair chance, and you might be surprised at how helpful they can become.

An hour without a mouse

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I’ve seen people try to use the web with just a keyboard for a full day, or even a week, but I thought a good place to start would just be a single hour. It doesn’t sound too tough at first, but you quickly realize — how do I switch tabs with my keyboard? Or change to a different application entirely?

It gets worse from there. But first, why?

Why try this at all?

You may have seen some of my recent posts related to accessibility, and this test is along that same vein. I want to better understand how impaired users (whether in mobility, vision, or otherwise) use the web, and going keyboard-only is a great place to start.

It’s hard to find exact numbers, but it seems that roughly 7% of users have “severe dexterity difficulties” that would preclude the use of a mouse, and it’s estimated that 1-2% of users have to rely on a screen reader. Screen reading software uses the same type of interface as a keyboard user would, so we’re talking about nearly 10% of users that aren’t using a mouse when they browse. That’s a lot of people!

By working through this, even for just an hour, I made additional changes to this site and GreenMellen (and will be updating our client sites as well) to make them more keyboard-friendly.

How to get started

I did my test using my Chromebook (at my new standing desk), and whatever type of operating system you’re using I suspect that most of your day is in the browser. For that, I’d suggest printing out two things:

  1. A list of Chrome keyboard shortcuts (or a similar list for a browser of your choice).
  2. A list of keyboard shortcuts for any of your main programs, like this info for Gmail.

From there, see what happens and where you get stuck.

Try it yourself

You don’t have to do it for a week, a day, or even an hour. Maybe just set aside 10 minutes, put the mouse in a drawer, and see what you can do. It should help you gain some empathy for users, and depending on your role it may encourage you to put in some work to make it easier for them (and everyone, really) to access the content that you’re working to share.