Looking to explore accessibility best practices across team functions in your organizations? Find answers to all your questions about accessible digital products and more at Axe-con 2023.

Axe-con provides insights into the critical role key players across functions like legal, design, management, product, etc., play in building accessible digital experiences.

Talks at the conference will feature case studies from enterprise companies leading in large-scale accessibility efforts and best practices and updates from technology leaders worldwide.

Attendance at the conference is free, and you can use your attendance towards continuing education (CE) towards IAAP certification.

Talks we’re excited about

• Ageism in Interfaces with Alex Tait
• Redesigning for Cognitive Ease with Alyssa Panetta
• Accessibility Maturity Models with Jonathan Thurston and James Thurston

Full program schedule

Join the free virtual conference

Registration is free! Sign up to access the live sessions and on-demand recordings of 60 sessions.

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Ready to make your digital products more accessible to your audience?

We provide inclusive website design solutions that welcome your audiences to engage with your content, products, and services. Bring the best of front-end development to your projects with our web standards-based, usable, accessible, and inclusive work.

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However, accessibility checkers have a significant gap: they are focused on code and strict technical compliance, not on usability, design, and content, and can’t truly identify how real people understand and interact with your website.

Accessibility checkers aren’t able to mimic how real people will interact with your website and content.

Here are some areas where automated tools will let you down.

They’re incomplete

Even for some technical items, these tools are not sufficient to be compliant. That’s because many of the standards set by the WCAG can only be evaluated manually, or are up to the discretion of an expert. Things like whether focus states function, or whether carousels are accessible, are difficult or impossible to evaluate with an automated tool due to their complexity.

Although you can meet many accessibility objectives with automated tools, a full manual review will take you much further. Through a manual review, you can build a site that can be enjoyed by a much wider audience than just those whose needs are covered by compliance standards.

They can be inaccurate

Some of the tests run by automated accessibility testing tools can be inaccurate, or give you false positives, which may make you think your site is more accessible than it is. With our site, we scored 100 (perfect score) on Google Lighthouse well before our website was genuinely accessible, especially with regard to screen readers.

Automated tools may flag issues taken care of in an alternate way—for example, for our forms, input elements like text boxes don’t have a focus state, because, in Javascript, we focus on the element surrounding the input. This implementation causes the checker to fail on that element, but the accessibility requirement is still being met based on WCAG criteria.

They can’t make choices

Many accessibility items are—even in WCAG’s official documentation—up to the discretion of the designer or developer. For instance, there might be many different ways to do the same thing, such as navigating a menu with a keyboard.

On our site, we’ve made it so that the menu uses the tab key to move to each of the top-level items, and arrow keys to access the sub-menus. Still, WCAG also provides examples where the tab key only accesses the first menu item, and arrow keys to move left/right between the other elements.

Both of these ways are technically accessible, but one or the other might make your site or specific design more or less usable.

Automated accessibility checkers aren’t able to help you make a judgement call.

Another example of this is adding labels to items to supplement what screen readers say out loud. For instance, adding a page header label to banner landmarks in order to be more descriptive and clear.

Automated accessibility checkers aren’t able to help you make this judgement call. You’ll need real users to test to see which one is more intuitive to use. Or an expert to take a look and evaluate your design.

They can’t see

Another area where accessibility checkers often fall short is in understanding the images and graphics on your site. If you use automated checkers often, you might notice that no matter what you do, warnings about text in images or clear alt tags never disappear.

This gap is because automated checkers can’t see your images and designs to determine whether you’ve met these requirements or not. In essence, they can’t know the context and content to make this judgement call.

So, instead, a manual review of images is necessary to make sure that text is not in any of your images, and alt tags explain the content of an image in a way that provides proper context.

Additionally, an accessibility checker can’t tell you how screen readers are reading out your content in real life beyond a simple “is it reading something” check.

For instance, if SVG settings aren’t set up for screen readers by setting the inline SVGs to have a role=“img” tag, the screen reader will try to announce the tags inside it, which results in announcing repetitive “IMAGE” tags over and over. This example is a terrible experience for people who use screen readers, and it’s unlikely an automated checker would let you know that this is occurring.

They can’t read

As far as the written content on your site, this is where automated accessibility checkers are the most limited.

Automated accessibility tools do not consider an inclusive lens, which can leave your site open to alienating potential users or inadvertently making content that excludes people. No automated tool can determine how your site makes users feel, or if they are feeling excluded by your content or the feel of your website.

The words and images you use on your website impact how a user feels, and an accessibility checker can’t analyze those words and images.

The combination of the words and imagery you use have context associated with them that makes users feel a certain way, from a spectrum of delighted to offended. A purely-automated accessibility tool can never understand this.

A more suitable process

So, if automated accessibility testing tools won’t get your site to where it needs to be, what should you do?

The best process is a comprehensive design, code, and content process, where you and your team work to ensure your site is as usable, accessible, and inclusive as possible. Then plan to review, improve, and test these items continually (internally or, preferably, with users). Using this process will help you holistically improve not just your site’s accessibility, but the general usability and performance of your website.

Most importantly, moving beyond automatically checking code—and embracing design, interaction, and usability considerations, alongside inclusive content—will open up your site to more potential users and help convert more of the users who are currently visiting.

Go beyond automated accessibility checkers with the Inclusive Website Audit

Make your website more usable, accessible, and inclusive for all with the Inclusive Website Audit. Don’t miss out on expanding your reach and engagement!

Get started from $999

The post Why automated accessibility checkers can’t make your website accessible appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Let’s take a look at the accessibility standards you should consider for your website.

WCAG 2.0 / WCAG 2.1

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are the standards that the majority of national and sub-national (provincial, state, etc) legislation is based on. These standards include guidelines for content, code, and technical guidelines for how colour, interactivity, and more are handled on a website.

AODA

The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA), is Ontario’s version of accessibility legislation. Based on requiring compliance with WCAG 2.0, AODA has general compliance requirements that many organizations must meet by January 2021.

However, it is strongly recommended that all organizations in Ontario work towards WCAG 2.0 AA compliance to meet AODA legislation in the future in order to ensure future compliance requirements and simply to improve the user experience for all users.

If you’re based in Ontario, learn more about AODA timelines and accessibility standards in our three-part series:

Accessibility matters – Part 1: Leading by doing

Accessibility matters – Part 2: The countdown is on in Ontario

Accessibility Matters – Part 3: Making sense of accessibility standards

ADA

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is the legislation that defines accessibility standards at the federal level in the United States. ADA is also based on WCAG 2.0 standards. If you’re an organization based in the United States, it’s important to comply with these accessibility standards to avoid legal action under ADA or section 508 (defined below).

Section 508

Section 508 is American legislation that mandates all federal entities—and any private corporations that do business with federal agencies—make their digital platforms accessible to people with disabilities. This includes healthcare, legal, financial, and numerous other private sector organizations, in addition to public sector organizations.

Not sure where to start?

No matter where you’re based, or what web accessibility standards you need to meet, we can help you ensure you not only comply with standards, but ensure you’re not losing out on a wider audience due to usability, accessibility, or inclusion issues on your site with  The Inclusive Website Audit.

The Inclusive Website Audit

Get started today with making your website more usable, accessible, and inclusive for all. Don’t miss out on expanding your reach and engagement!

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Here’s a quick primer on what you need to know about accessibility standards and how you can take next steps.

What accessibility standards do you need to meet and what must you do to meet them?

The best start is identifying what category your business falls into, which determines the strictness of the compliance levels you need to meet. These are split into A, AA, and AAA, with AAA representing the strictest compliance standard. Each level has its own guidelines, which are designed to correspond with WCAG, AODA, and other regional guidelines.

With colour contrast, the required contrast ratio to meet AA standards is 4.5, where AAA is 7.0. So the level of contrast with the background and text colours you use must be much higher to meet the requirement.

How do you determine what compliance level your business should aim for?

Ontario, Canada, which has a set of standards under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) determines compliance primarily by the size of the business, and whether the business is private or public sector.

If your business is a private sector or non-profit organization with 50 or more employees, you must comply with level AA by 2021 if you operate in Ontario. This AA stipulation is also a requirement of any public sector organization of any size. For companies that are private sector, with fewer than 50 employees, we strongly recommend that your organization move towards meeting AA standards, although there is no expected compliance timeline.

AA standards are Say Yeah’s chosen level of compliance given that the standards are rigorous enough to accommodate the vast majority of users who have a disability, whether temporary, situational, or permanent, while improving user experience for all people. The main difference between AA and AAA is taking into account legacy accessibility technology, as well as stricter standards for certain types of content, such as live captions.

For many websites, it is extremely difficult to meet some of these criteria, and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)—which define the standards most regions adhere to—do not require this level of compliance for most organizations. However, many of the criteria will make your site much more accessible and usable for all, and we recommend that you aim to meet as many of these criteria as possible.

By complying with AA or AAA standards, your site will better meet the needs of users with screen readers, low-vision, reduced motor capability, and many other disabilities.

However, when you consider that these standards improve the experience for all users, with improved readability, more convenient ways of accessing your content, and a more structured and intuitive site design and navigation, there is significant value in taking these steps.

Check out our previous post in this series on accessibility compliance timelines, to find out when your organization needs to comply with these standards.

Get started with an Inclusive Website Audit

Make your website more usable, accessible, and inclusive for all with the Inclusive Website Audit. Don’t miss out on expanding your reach and engagement!

Get started from $999

The post Accessibility Matters – Part 3: Making sense of accessibility standards appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Today, we’re going to explain the timeline requirements for Ontario-based organizations to meet AODA requirements without risking fines.

In Ontario, our AODA regulations distinguish the types of organizations that must comply with each of these three levels.

• By January 1st of 2012 – the Ontario Government mandated that all of its own new internet and intranet websites and web content must comply with Level AA. This applies to the many sites related to Ontario Government Ministries, as well as the Legislature.
• By January 1st of 2014 – all designated public service organizations (e.g. hospitals, universities, and other public institutions) must comply with Level A.
• By January 1st of 2014 – all ‘large organizations’ (institutions with 50+ employees that offer goods, services, or facilities) must comply with Level A for new internet/web content
• By January 1st of 2016 – the Ontario Government mandated the AA standard to ALL Ontario Government internet websites and web content (e.g. videos or other non-site-specific media).
• By January 1st of 2020 – This AA standard applied to all Ontario Government internet sites, all intranet sites, and all web content.
• By January 1st of 2021 – Compliance with Level AA for ALL internet and web content of designated public service organizations
• By January 1st of 2021 – ALL internet and web content from ‘large organizations’ must comply with Level AA

There are some exclusions and exceptions with certain parts of the outline above, specifically regarding live video captions and pre-recorded video audio descriptions. You can view the details about the different organizational structures and requirements with this PDF from Accessibility Canada. The legislation also has some nuances with new domain names, or overhauling of existing websites.

It’s important to remember that these timelines and compliance levels are absolutely mandatory in the province of Ontario. Any non-compliant organizations do risk fines.

Our team is excited to see a new era of web accessibility in Ontario with this AODA legislation and especially enthusiastic to bring these new standards and values to our clients in the years ahead, helping you achieve mandated requirements today, while better serving all customers through ongoing best practices.

In Part 3, we’ll review the levels of WCAG 2.0 compliance, as well as other legislation and standards your organization should be aware of for compliance, including ADA and AODA.

Get started with meeting AODA compliance requirements with the Inclusive Website Audit

Make your website more usable, accessible, and inclusive for all with the Inclusive Website Audit. Don’t miss out on expanding your reach and engagement!

Get started from $999

The post Accessibility matters – Part 2: The countdown is on in Ontario appeared first on Say Yeah!.

• levelling up digital and technical knowledge and decision-making,
• developing realistic, actionable, and impactful next steps, and
• ensuring product and service feedback loops, KPIs (key performance indicators), and OKRs (objectives and key results) that lead to continuous improvement.

While these pillars are important, underlying them all are our core non-negotiable values:

• usability
• accessibility
• inclusion

We’re leading by doing when it comes to promoting and improving inclusion in STEM through our volunteer organization Together, as well as ensuring that the websites and digital products we work on are accessible.

This subject is top of mind for us here in Ontario, as we await the enactment of a wide-spanning piece of legislation, which all organizations need to keep in mind.

It’s called the ‘Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act,’ or AODA for short; its aim is to make online spaces accessible to all.

The standards of the AODA are defined by the standards organization for the Internet – the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) – and are titled the ‘Web Content Accessibility Guidelines’ (acronym version: WCAG).

Following these standards ensures that online content is more accessible, especially for people with disabilities, but ultimately for everyone.

It’s important to remember that designing anything in an accessible manner ensures that ALL users will have an easier experience accessing information and services.

In Part 2, we’ve outlined the timelines for complying with AODA, which organizations must comply, and the consequences of not complying by these deadlines.

Accessibility and inclusive design

If you’re looking for strategies to make sure your product or service is inclusive and accessible, we’re here to help.

Get in touch

The post Accessibility matters – Part 1: Leading by doing appeared first on Say Yeah!.

7 steps to making your site more accessible beginning with your next content update.

With this book, you’ll learn how to:

• Take essential steps towards meeting Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA), Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), and Section 508 guidelines.
• Save time with future accessibility initiatives by taking simple steps now.
• Tell your story with text to improve website accessibility by users and search engines.
• Write for your audience to ensure your messaging is understood.
• Structure your content so it’s easy to navigate on multiple devices.
• Describe images to improve your storytelling.
• Make audio and video more accessible with captioning and transcripts.
• Clearly identify links so users know where they’re going.
• Write an accessibility statement and begin a dialog with your users.

Download the PDF

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