You do not need to be an accessibility expert to make your website significantly more accessible. And this does not diminish the skills, knowledge, and expertise that go into becoming an accessibility expert.
You are not going to replace hundreds if not thousands of hours of education and experience. But what you can do is you can invest a few hours into learning accessibility and apply that knowledge to your website.
So whereas accessibility experts need to have a broad depth of knowledge across many different types of digital assets and different situations, you only need to be concerned with accessibility of your digital asset, most likely a website.
So even as a nontechnical person, there are so many steps that you can take right now that significantly improve the accessibility of your website. So you can add descriptive alt text to your meaningful images. You can add null alt attributes to your decorative images.
You can ensure that your closed captions are available and accurate. You can ensure that you have descriptive page titles. You can make sure your headings are properly nested. You can make sure that your headings themselves are descriptive and beyond just the remediation of those things.
There is more you can do so you can find accessibility issues that exist or you can find the spots where accessibility issues may exist for someone to look further. So even without web development background, I’ve already listed off several things you can do.
Now of course you will need to source work- remediation work to someone who does have a web development background that you trust to take the information that you are providing and make the requisite changes.
But that can be done. It is doable. So you can see how- when you’re only working within the narrow scope of your website. You only need to have enough information to improve the accessibility specific to your website. So looking at your content, what do you have as content?
What are your interactive elements? When you look at those specifically, accessibility becomes much more doable. And it’s not going to be perfect because again, you don’t have those hundreds of hours, if not thousands of hours that have gone into learning accessibility.
But so many of the WCAG success criteria are intuitive, and they’re fairly easy to understand if not implement. So there are steps you can take right now that can improve the accessibility of your website.
And then after you work through those there, there is even more that you can do. simply by spending a few hours and learning about the different accessibility considerations.
