Digital accessibility – a term that makes all the web assets accessible to all; irrespective of their physical ability level. However, there are certain barriers that make this whole process of digital accessibility challenging. Websites of all sizes of business regardless of their purpose should be accessible as per the standard of the legal guidelines.
What is digital accessibility?
Digital accessibility is a way to make websites, web applications, and mobile applications accessible, usable, and easily navigable to the person with disabilities, functional limitations, or with other special needs.
Web accessibility is an important part of digital accessibility as it denotes the removal of barriers to accessing a website. When the website is accessible; the reach is much broader as more people can access it.
Digital accessibility is a way to level up all the players and enables them to take part in the education, sports, economic, and technology spheres. Eventually, this digital accessibility can actually help all people; not only a subgroup.
For example, Dr. Raymond Kurzweil invented the machine to read for the blinds but with time, the technology was used for the speech technology that helps everyone to navigate while driving. Just like that, e-books, captioned videos, or voice recognition were initially invented for disabled people.
Challenges of Digital Accessibility
Making the web inclusive is the main goal for digital accessibility but there are a few challenges that work as a barrier in the process.
- Lack of Clarity: There are already legal acts in different countries that prohibit the website to discriminate on the base of physical ability. As the internet has become an integral part of our life, not having access is a huge disadvantage not only for the users but also for the website owners as well. Many business owners are not aware of the laws to follow compliance.
- Dynamic Nature of the Internet: The internet is not a constant thing and changes take part in almost every day. It is challenging to keep up with all the changes and make it accessible. No matter how small the change is; it can make the whole content inaccessible.
- Limitation of technology: There are some limitations to detecting common accessibility errors as the best technology can detect only 70% of the errors. Human judgment is required to understand the context and act accordingly. For example, the machine can detect missing a description but it cannot state whether the description is appropriate or not.
The perfect digital accessibility solutions in the present time have the perfect blend of automation tools and manual audits. Accessible Minds includes both automated and manual testing of any digital asset across industries for accessibility. Our process shows that it is the most effective way to get the solution for web accessibility through the perfect combination of human expertise and technology.
