Many people ask to see examples of accessible websites.
And the reason why examples aren’t relevant is because an accessible website can look like any other.
You can go to Walmart.com, Target.com, many of these main all of these different retail websites are already accessible.
There might be a few issues but for the most part they’re accessible.
So the point is is that many different types of websites can be WCAG conformant.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines don’t dramatically- if you follow their the the these standards strictly they’re not going to dramatically alter the visual appearance of a website.
It’s- think of it more as there are going to be programmatic changes made – so changes made in the code, and there are also going to be considerations made that help with the ease of use and the understandability of the website and maybe the presentation so that the website is easier to navigate.
But they are going to look markedly different from any other website.
So that’s why when you look for examples, you can look at most major websites are going to be accessible.
And I know I know Target is because Target was is one of the landmark cases in accessibility and they ended up settling for millions of dollars and I think this was back in 2006.
But Target has definitely embraced accessibility. Google’s- googles apps are going to be accessible, Google is good about accessibility.
Microsoft is good about accessibility and you know all of these websites look completely different.
Walmart is going to be accessible.
So this just illustrates to you that accessibility is not it doesn’t look one way, it- it can look many many different ways.
The only real changes that that could possibly come for this are color scheme and possibly adding headings to structure.
So making instead of having regular text, you have headings which make the text a different size and weight so you would rather than designing it to make it look a certain way you would add semantics and then modify the semantics to be- style the semantics to look a certain way there’s.
But there’s not that much that changes it’s more just considerations something optional as you could remove any carousels or slideshows.
Slideshows are bad for accessibility but it’s not an absolute requirement under the web content accessibility guidelines.
But for that matter neither is color contrast let’s say our color contrast ratio falls short of the 4.5 to one standard color contrast ratio with text to background.
Doesn’t necessarily mean that your website is inaccessible and/or not compliant with the ADA.
We don’t even know exactly what compliance is, but we do know that these web content accessibility guidelines are referenced continually so we look to them for guidance on what to do.
But examples in website accessibility – you could look at any web I mean there are so many different websites that are accessible they look so many different ways.
It’s not the visual presentation that you would want to focus on – it is the flexibility, the understandability, the ease of navigation, the availability of alternatives and that’s not something that is normally perceivable unless you are looking for it.
Many of the websites that you visit, especially the major ones they’ve already taken this into an account. So when you go to Walmart or you’re shopping on these any of these major websites they’ve already- they’ve already taken accessibility and incorporated it.
And if they haven’t then you probably wouldn’t know anyway because again they don’t these websites they don’t look different from one another, it’s more just the considerations that are made.
So if you would like to learn more about the legal landscape, best practices for ADA compliance, and then how to approach accessibility I highly recommend my book, it’s titled, The ADA Book and I will provide a link below.
