Where do I start?

Getting started with accessibility can be daunting. Here are some of the essentials.

Learn about accessibility

• Familiarize yourself with common accessibility keywords. This will make dense reading material easier to digest.
• Challenge the notion that working on accessibily only serve a “minority of your user base”. In reality, making an accessible website means making it accessible to all people. This work goes beyond making websites accessible to blind users. There are myriad ways in which your website could be difficult to use; check out these articles for examples:
  • An Alphabet of Accessibility Issues
  • The Veil of Ignorance
  • It’s Not About Morals: Accessibility is for the Masses
  • Accessibility means more than making sure your website passes an automated list of criteria. Accessibility goes hand-in-hand with every project’s core goals; an accessible website should strive to make the end service as easy to use as possible. Accessibility is empathizing with your users and making sure their needs are met.

Get your current projects up to speed

• Revisit your projects and evaluate how accessible they are.
  • Accessibility validators are extremely useful for doing this initial digging. Check out the tools_and_plugins directory for guides on getting started with accessibility plugins.
  • Learn how to use a screen reader and actually test your sites; validators can only do so much. Even better: find an actual user who uses screen readers to test your site.
• Depending on how old the project is, there might be a long list of things that need improvements. Start by breaking that list into small tasks and sub-groups that can be worked on over time.
  • Don’t burn yourself out by doing everything at once! Stretching out your work helps you retain the new techniques you’ve learned; eventually this work will be second nature to you, and you won’t have to go on Accessibility Crusades to “catch up”.

Bake accessibility into your design & development workflow

• After getting your projects caught up, you don’t want to have to do it all over again. A good goal is to build your projects accessibly from the very beginning, instead of leaving accessibility as an afterthought.
  • Being mindful of accessibility starting with the design process will save you time in the long run. You won’t have to re-build entire components of your site after realizing they’re completely inaccessible.
  • Don’t re-invent the wheel! When you build custom web components, look to see if other people have already built something similar. Even if they haven’t, there are probably accessible sub-components (HTML elements, ARIA entities) that can be stitched together into what you want.
  • Take notes when making accessibility improvements. When you run into a similar task/problem later, you’ll be thankful.
• Much like a website is a living entity, the task of accessibility is never “finished”. Keep a vigilant eye on your site as it evolves.
  • Components provided by third-party vendors can break and/or change. What are your website’s external vulnerabilities?
  • Project goals can evolve. When your site gets updated, you need a way to ensure that those changes are accessible.
  • User needs can change. Investigate how your site is being used. Do user experience (UX) research and testing. Find out if your site is as useable as you think it is. Find out what improvements your users would like to see. Even if your site meets basic accessibility standards, there are probably ways in which you can make your site more understandable or easier to navigate.

Share what you know

• “Accessibility takes a village.” Help get your colleagues up to speed so that you don’t have to go it alone!