«The power of the Web lies in its universality. Access by anyone, regardless of the disability that is present is an essential aspect »
Source: World Wide Web ConsortiuLaunches International Program Office for Web Accessibility Initiative. Tim Berners-Lee, director of W3C and inventor of the World Wide Web
These words from Tim Berners are one of the pillars that we are moving through Lefty Garage , the universality of the web , that is, that any user has the possibility to access, in an appropriate way, all the contents of said web.
Talking about Web Accessibility is talking about making it easier for all people to know the contents of that Web, regardless of the type of hardware, software, network infrastructure, language, culture, location geographic and capabilities of the people who enter it.
With this idea of facilitating access to all people, whatever their capabilities, the Web Accessibility Initiative, known as WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative), was born. This is an activity developed by W3C, whose objective is to facilitate communication with people with different abilities, developing access guidelines, improving the tools for the evaluation and repair of Web accessibility, carrying out an educational and awareness-raising work in relation to the importance of the accessible design of Web pages, and opening new fields through research in this area. < p>
Source: Brief Web Accessibility Guide, W3C.
And how do you make an accessible website? We do not want or have to give up good design and use new technologies, you only need to adapt them so they are comfortable to use for people who want to know our website. To do this, different techniques and tools are used to facilitate the reading and understanding of the site to all groups.
For example, a person with blindness or visual impairment will need the web to be «read» in text; For this it is necessary to tag the images properly and not abuse the animations. However, a person with reduced mobility may need the different links on the website to be comfortable to press, since it is possible that their accuracy is not high at the time of «clicking». There are many small details that make an accessible website.
Neither let us forget that the search engines are «blind» , so if our website is well adapted we will also notice it as a factor that helps improve the position of our website.
Not all people can access information in the same way, so the recommendation is to consider alternatives for those who do not see the images, do not click on the links or for those who do not distinguish the colors.
For all this, from Lefty Garage we always recommend that the websites are made with accessibility in mind from the beginning and for this our development team is in continuous training in this field, continuously incorporating the news and being pioneers in the development of new web accessibility options.