I hope these Quick Lessons have sparked some thought about, or even better, changes to the way you’re planning, designing, and building websites. If you joined us for our Web Accessibility 101 workshop on November 15th, we want to give a HUGE thanks to you and hope you walked away armed with some good knowledge and great ideas for making your websites ADA and WCAG compliant. Making sure your site is accessible helps make a better web experience for everyone!!
What has this been all about?
HDC (the company that now runs MasterWP) has had a lot going on this year. For one, we took over this very newsletter! We’ve also grown significantly, and we have been constantly coming up with and trying new ways to improve our processes and our brands. If you’ve been reading our articles, you may have noticed that we are on a pretty big mission to become all-around super a11y champions. We want to arm ourselves – and all of you – with the tools you need to make the best accessibility design and development decisions. We are on a journey, and it is not over by any means.
Why is it important?
Making a big difference doesn’t require a Herculean effort. My hope with these Quick Lessons is to demonstrate that sometimes small, simple changes can mean the difference between a good user experience and someone abandoning ship out of frustration. A frustrated user could leave your site seconds after landing there, and therefore is much less likely to consume your information and products. More often than not, they will also share their bad experience publicly, which can further damage your reputation and your sales.
Who benefits?
Your target audience probably doesn’t include everyone, but consider that there are people in every audience that use assistive technology of some kind. As the saying goes, you are only as strong as your weakest link. Following accessibility guidelines and standards helps make your website as strong as possible. Plus it just feels good to do the right thing.
How do I implement this on my website?
If you missed them, you can go back and check out my previous Quick Lessons: Buttons vs Links, Alt Text, Headings, and Skip Links. Hopefully you joined us for our workshop in which my a11y ally Devin Egger demonstrated a metric ton of ways to become compliant. Along with all of that, you can check out the Resources below for even more. There’s no reason not to level up your accessibility game!
How can I learn more about this?
Stay tuned because we have some projects in the works that will help you learn about and implement ADA compliance on your websites. We will very likely have more workshops in the future where we deep dive into some of the more impactful and important ADA and WCAG guidelines.
We are really excited to share all of the knowledge we have gathered and all of the new things we learn with you. Hopefully you’ve walked away from our workshop with tons of ideas about how to improve your processes and make accessible websites and apps your standard. We’re glad you’re on this journey with us!
Resources
- WebAIM (Web Accessibility In Mind)
- WAVE (Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools) – WebAIM
- Web Accessibility Initiative – W3C
- ARIA Authoring Practices Guide – W3C
- Accessibility – MDN Web Docs (Mozilla)
- US Web Design Systems
