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.

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Behind me on the white board I have two watches drawn.

And one watch is under street corner A and the other watch is under what is labeled street corner B.

Now both watches are purported to be gold.

Which one is better?

They’re both fake.

So that’s what it’s like when you’re debating whether AccessiBe or Userway is better.

Both are fake accessibility. They’re pretend accessibility.

They give the illusion of accessibility but they are ultimately fake. They are fugazi accessibility.

You’re not getting a real watch.

Do you think either of these watches, even though they have the name Rolex on them, do you think either of these watches are a Rolex?

No and it’s the same with AccessiBe and Userway.

Neither of them make your website accessible.

They’re fake, they’re just they’re there to represent accessibility, but they don’t actually make anything accessible.

And so also on the whiteboard I’ve got a rudimentary website drawn there’s a header, there’s a body of content, there’s a sidebar, and then there is a small accessibility icon on the bottom and that’s meant to represent one of these widgets.

And there’s there’s literally over a dozen.

And then it’s superimposed to show a widget with its different options and settings.

And the important thing is these settings when changes are made to them they are applied over the website.

But what’s important is that the website content and the websites code aren’t actually being made accessible themselves.

There are only superficial changes that don’t actually make the website accessible.

And sometimes they can actually negatively impact accessibility.

But they don’t actually- there might be a few superficial changes like increasing the size of the text or changing the color contrast.

But what’s happening with overlays is they’re more designed to sell to website owners than they are to actually enhance the accessibility of a website.

So for someone that for someone that is being presented on an accessibility overlay, it looks like it’s doing a lot but, in reality, it’s hard it’s hardly doing anything.

At best there is some marginal benefit but overlay vendors have no problem telling you a lie, right.

If you go to any number of overlay websites what will they tell you they are a “solution” for accessibility, the number one solution for web accessibility.

Absolutely not completely a lie.

It’s fake accessibility, fugazi accessibility.

It’s just like buying a $49 gold watch on the street corner.

You’re not getting a gold watch.

You are getting a fake and it’s for- it’s for appearances, it’s for the- to show off that you’ve that you have accessibility enabled.

But you don’t, it’s a lie that you’re being sold.

The post Accessibe vs. Userway: Which Overlay Widget is Best? appeared first on The ADA Book.

The other day I thought of the perfect term for website accessibility overlays and that is fugazi.

So overlays amount to fugazi accessibility.

And what does fugazi mean?

Well it’s a slang term and it means a few different things.

But, generally, it means something is fake or artificial or has no substance, it’s a counterfeit, and it can also mean something that is messed up beyond repair.

So I think of fugazi in terms of watches.

So with a Rolex watch, if you don’t have a real watch – if it’s a fake, then it’s a fugazi.

You have a fugazi watch.

So with website accessibility, overlays are fugazis.

And here on the white board I have drawn a website, there’s a video on top, there’s a main body of content and then there’s a sidebar form fields and button and then more content beneath that.

And then last there’s a tiny accessibility icon and then I’ve superimposed that to represent this widget with a menu of supposed accessibility options.

Now this lays over the website – any changes that are rendered they over the website.

Hence the term overlay.

And so overlays are not real accessibility because real accessibility that actually makes your website accessible requires you to remediate your code, to go in and edit your code, to remediate your content, to make sure that your content has the accessibility considerations incorporated.

So the way we do this is we look to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and they tell us all of the different ways that we can make our website accessible.

But what we do know is that these overlay widgets do not make your website WCAG conformant.

And I have here written by the accessibility widget – it’s just a cheap widget, that’s all it is.

It amounts to fugazi accessibility, you are being sold a fake, you are being sold a lie.

I think of it as we’re on the streets and there’s a guy out there selling Rolex watches for $100 on the corner.

He’s selling you fakes, you should know it.

If you don’t then you’re not paying attention so does he really is the perfect term for this and and over.

I think one of the problems is people that buy the people the website owner and operators that are buying accessibility widgets, they’re believing the lie.

This is- it’s not there. And so but the problem is these overlay vendors, they don’t have any problem with lying to you and telling you that their cheap widget is a real solution.

And what happens is the overlay widgets installed, you’re showing everybody you have fake accessibility, but meanwhile you’re not- if you think that it’s protecting you against litigation you are mistaken.

If you go to overlayfalseclaims.com you will see that a number of complaints have been filed against websites with fugazi accessibility.

So the point of this video is that if you have an overlay it’s fake accessibility, your website is not actually accessible to people with disabilities, and you are still completely susceptible to any litigation.

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