You cannot turn on accessibility; you can’t activate accessibility; you cannot enable accessibility. Accessibility is not available through automation. The only way to make your website or other digital assets accessible is by manually finding accessibility issues and then manually fixing those accessibility issues.
So what we want to do is make our website inherently accessible, and that means coding it in an accessible manner, and then that also means looking over our content and making sure our content is accessible.
So our content being images, videos, audio, etc., we want to make sure that we have accessibility enabled in our processes, so that we are both coding our websites and other digital assets accessibly and then creating our content in an accessible manner.
And that’s the only way to make our assets accessible. We can’t do it by installing a widget or using JavaScript that doesn’t work. You can’t turn on accessibility and not- even if you could create a problem because then it creates a different experience, and someone has to take another action, a separate action, to create an experience that should be available anyways.
So we never want to have separate experiences. We never want to require someone to take an additional step. We never want to have someone undergo a learning curve to figure out how to use a digital asset.
Instead, we want to make sure that everything is accessible in and of itself by itself without any problems. We can, in limited circumstances, and I’m thinking of website accessibility scans, we can use automation to help our processes so to reduce human error and to speed up the process when we were manually reviewing our websites.
But we cannot achieve accessibility, we can’t make our websites accessible through automation, and we can’t have a user experience where someone has to turn on accessibility because 1) that doesn’t work, you can’t turn on accessibility, but then 2) we don’t want to treat people differently on the basis of disability, and when you require someone to activate or enable accessibility, that is what’s happening.
Someone must now take an additional step to have an accessible experience, and that shouldn’t be the case rather, especially because this is something that we can do in- with websites it’s readily available.
All we have to do is make sure that our code is accessible and our content is accessible, and through manual work we can do that.
