As of September 23, 2020, the websites of government and semi-government agencies must comply with the guidelines of the WCAG 2.1. New websites do have to comply with these rules since September 2019. Commercial websites will also have to deal with stricter legislation on accessibility in the coming years. It is quite a job to understand how to interpret all these guidelines and to do something with them. That is why we will share some useful tricks with you in the coming period to test the accessibility of your website. They are a good start to create an accessible website.
It is useful to first test how the accessibility of your website is. You learn a lot from it and it also helps you to take more targeted measures. In this series of blog articles, we are going to share five simple tests with you. The following topics are covered:
So we kick off the series with the subject “color and contrast”.
Websites become easier to read if there is sufficient contrast between the text color and the background color. This is of course important for the visually challenged, but also for color blind people, for example. In the Netherlands, 8% of men are colorblind and 2% of women. That is a large group. In addition, you help people with healthy eyes, who have put their screen on energy saving or work in circumstances with a lot of backlight or light. The difference in contrast is not only important for text, by the way. You also have to take into account colors in tables or graphs.
The WCAG describes the minimum requirements for contrast ratios. A good contrast ratio starts at 4.5:1 for plain text. A contrast ratio of 1.0:1 indicates no contrast at all and 21.0:1 is the maximum possible contrast. Large text (from 18pt) and bold text (from 14pt) are easier to read and therefore need less contrast. The minimum contrast ratio for large and bold text is 3.0:1. As mentioned before, minimal contrast ratios also apply to elements in the website without text, such as tables and graphs. A minimum contrast difference of 3.0:1 is sufficient. But there are a few of exceptions. For example, you do not have to adjust your logo to meet the accessibility conditions. Good contrast is important, but do not exaggerate. An extremely high contrast ratio of 21.0:1 (between pure black and white for example) does not read well for many people. Do these numbers mean little to you? Fortunately, there are handy tools with which you can test your color contrast.
A number of websites and contrast accessibility tools are available to help you determine the contrast ratio between foreground and background color:
Contrast-ratio.com: website where you can easily fill in the foreground and background color to calculate the color contrast.
Contrast Checker: website of Acard Communication, a Canadian advertising agency, where you can fill in colors and calculate the contrast.
Chrome development tools: Chrome has developed the Color Picker tool, which allows you to determine and improve color contrast.
Firefox development tools: The Firefox development toolkit includes the Firebug component. Here you can determine your colors and compare them with the minimum contrast requirements of WCAG.
Luminosity Color Contrast Ratio Analyzer: This free tool tells you the contrast value of two selected colors. You can also immediately see whether the combination meets the requirements of WCAG 2.1. The Luminosity Color Contrast Ratio Analyzer was developed by Juicy Studio in England.
Want to know more about making your website more accessible? In part 2 of this blog series we will zoom in and out of your website.
4.5 million Dutch people have difficulty reading, understanding or using websites. So there is a big chance that you will not or not reach a good part of your target group with your website. Do you also want to make your website accessible to this group? Then you are facing a nice challenge. This group consists of young people with dyslexia, but also older people who no longer see well. You understand: within this huge group, not everyone has the same needs. Fortunately, there is a simple solution to reach a larger part of your target audience with web accessibility. Wondering what that solution is? Then read on.
Stichting Accessibility uses the following definition for web accessibility:
“Making the Web accessible to everyone, including the elderly and people with disabilities … It is (certainly in the Netherlands) not about access to the internet, but about the usability of the services and information offered by people with disabilities.”
This definition clearly explains how many people think about web accessibility. It especially seems to be a challenge that applies to people with disabilities. But this also creates the image that it is a problem for them for which we must offer a solution. I therefore find the definition of Carie Fischer, a leading accessibility writer from America, much more pleasant. She says:
‘Website accessibility is actively designing, developing, and creating content in such a way that it does not hinder any person from interacting with the website.’
And with that, she equates web accessibility with user-friendliness. When you think about the user-friendliness of your website, you also think about the 25% who struggle to use your website in a traditional way.
Many companies pay little attention to target groups with disabilities when developing their website. This may be because they underestimate the size of this group. With people with a disability you probably think of blind and partially sighted people, but then you only have a small part of it. Many websites are also difficult to access for the elderly, low-literate, dyslexics, immigrants and people with motor disabilities. Ultimately you end up with about 25% of the Dutch population. The tricky thing about web accessibility is that it’s impossible to create a single solution that helps with every individual disability. It does not exist. From that observation, the idea for the startup Aally originated.
Aally provides a solution to reach a larger part of your target audience with web accessibility. Aally offers an individual user the opportunity to adapt the content of a website to his or her individual needs. Someone with dyslexia chooses a more legible font and uses a digital reading ruler, a visually challenged person chooses a larger font or has the text read aloud. Ivar Illing, community manager at Visionair and himself partially sighted, was at the start of the startup:
“What makes Aally different is that we understand that one solution is not enough. One functional limitation is not the other. What works well for me makes a web page completely unreadable for someone with dyslexia. We therefore do not reason from the technical point of view, but from the end user.”
Since September 23 of this year, every (semi-) governmental organization requires to indicate to what extent its websites comply with the guidelines of WCAG 2.1 AA. The legal basis for this lies in the ‘Tijdelijk besluit digitale toegankelijke overheid’ that came into effect on July 1, 2018. This Decree, following from the European Accessibility Act, stipulates that websites and apps of (semi-) government institutions must be accessible to everyone. We previously wrote an article about this. Since the obligation for apps only applies from September 23, 2021, we will limit ourselves in this article to the website. Public and semi-governmental institutions can indicate how far they are in this process for a specific website by drafting and publishing an accessibility statement. But what should this statement contain of? DigiToegankelijk offers an extensive explanation on its website. We summarize the most important elements for you in this article.
In an accessibility statement, you take account for where you stand in the process of ensuring that your website meets the accessibility requirements. You describe the planned or fulfilled measures to make the website comply with the guidelines of WCAG 2.1 AA. You therefore also need to include a time schedule in the statement.
With the statement, a (semi) governmental institute also indicates to what extent it takes the necessary measures to ensure that its website meets the accessibility requirements. This is the so-called compliance status of your website. Your website can have one of the following statuses:
You may find that meeting certain WCAG requirements is disproportionately burdensome for your organization. The ‘Tijdelijk besluit digitale toegankelijke overheid’ gives you the option to indicate in your statement why certain requirements are (temporarily) not applied. However, lack of priority, time or knowledge are no legitimate reasons.
In your statement you need to describe how someone can address accessibility problems of your website and what will be done with such notification. In addition, it must be clear what to someone cab do when you do nothing with the notification.
For a good statement about the current accessibility of your website, you need insight into the current state of the website. To get this information you do an audit. An audit must meet a number of requirements. For example, the audit must be performed manually based on the WCAG-EM evaluation method. The audit report may not be older than 36 months.
You need to include all the above elements in your statement in a well-organized manner. In order to be able to scan accessibility statements quickly and to be able to compare them properly, they must comply with a standard model. Logius has developed a tool, the invulassistent, with which you can draft your statement in the latest version of this model.
The statement is a legal obligation. That is why it must be signed by an officer or director who is responsible for web accessibility within your organization and who can therefore be held accountable for this.
In any case, you publish your accessibility statement on your website. The statement must be easy to find, for example on your homepage. You can also include the statement in the Register of Accessibility Statements. It is sufficient to link from your website to the full statement in this register. Another advantage is that when you are responsible for multiple websites, it is easier to you manage everything from one place.
Drafting and publishing your accessibility statement is just a start. The statement is no more than a temporary report on the state of accessibility of your website. You must of course carry out he measures you describe in the accessibility statement. When you have done this, you process the results of this in an updated version of your statement. You can use the invulassistent again to renew your statement.
Your website is not a static medium. You make technical adjustments and you regularly add new content. It is therefore important to continue to monitor this once your website is accessible. You do this, for example, by means of automatic tests and by regularly carrying out manual audits. In any case, an audit report may not be older than 36 months.
Do you need help drafting and publishing your accessibility statement and conducting an accessibility audit? We are happy to help you! Please contact us!
People write a lot about web accessibility. We try to collect as many of these items from The Netherlands and abroad. The most striking and interesting we share on our blog every month. This way you do not have to search yourself and you are always aware of what is going on! Therefore here is the web accessibility news of April 2021!
Developer Brthrs has released the Denken in Beperkingen app that supports app builders in developing apps for people with challenges. The app shows the do’s and don’ts in developing an app for various groups with a challenge. It provides tips for users with physical limitations, speech linitations, visual challenges and hearing challenges.
Read the article on Android World
As a result of corona, council meetings have mainly been broadcasted online the previous year. Surprisingly the meetings are attended much better than in the old situation. As a result of their web accessibility obligations, the municipalities of Bergheze, Oss and Meijerijstad have now started subtitling the meetings. Therefore it is possible now to see automatically generated captions of the spoken words with a CC button in the webcast.
Read the article of Brabants Dagblad
Last month, the water boards decided to renew their digitization approach. A lot of new legislation is being introduced with regard to digitization, so water boards have to go the extra mile to be able to meet all the new requirements. Since September last year, water boards must also have an accessible website or at least have a statement stating how they will make their websites accessible. In the document “Basis op Orde” ambitious goals are formulated for four themes: “digital services”, “digital organization and collaboration”, “digital information provision” and “information security and privacy”. This concerns, among other things, the accessibility of websites, the active publication of documents and the mutual exchange of information.
Since September 2020, (semi) government agencies must comply with the web accessibility guidelines. But commercial organizations will also have to make their websites accessible. According to the European Accessibility Act, companies’ websites will have to comply with the WCAG 2.x standard by June 28, 2025. Jake Abma (ING) and Raph de Rooij (Internal Affairs) discuss in this webinar hosted by Emerce how you can best organize urgency for accessibility within your company and emphasize that this is a process of years. So it is certainly not too early to start now!
Watch the webcast on emerce.nl
This was our web accessibility news of April 2021. Want more news? Then also read the web accessibility news of 2020 (June | July | August | September | October | November and December) and of 2021 (January | February | March)!
People write a lot about web accessibility. We try to collect as many of these items from The Netherlands and abroad. The most striking and interesting we share on our blog every month. This way you do not have to search yourself and you are always aware of what is going on! Therefore here is the web accessibility news of March 2021!
Due to the corona measures, we have become accustomed to video calling via providers such as Teams or Zoom. Zoom already offers the option to have meetings subtitled live. Subsequent to Zoom, Teams now also introduces a live transcription feature.
This provides people with information as they enter a meeting already in progress and to help deaf and partially hearing people better understand what is being said in a meeting. The live speech-to-text feature is based on AI technology and is currently only offered in English.
Read the article on Microsoft.com
In addition to live transcription in video calling, Microsoft has also launched an app that allows you to register a conversation and translate it right away. The app is unique to its competitors because it realizes the live transcription via the recording buttons of all smartphones that are present. It uses the smartphone closest to the person speaking at the time for the transcription and therefore the rendering is the most accurate. Moreover, the app can translate what is spoken in real time into 80 different languages.
Read the article on TechCrunch
When you want to make a website or app accessible, you need to do a test whether there are any accessibility problems. Although some of it can be done automatically, a large part of these test are done manually. It is difficult for a computer to understand the visual context of an item on a site. Evinced has developed software that is able to analyze the visual user interface on a website by means of AI technology and compare it with the underlying code to see if there are accessibility problems. As a result, a large part of the manual testing can be executed automatically. Evinced has now secured around $ 20 million in capital investments to scale up.
Read the article on Computerworld
The most talked about provider of overlays and plugins in the US accessibility market is AccessiBe, a company with a controversial reputation. It claims to make websites accessible with its overlay, thus sparking false promises. In his podcast, Jonathan Mosen discusses the controversy surrounding AccessiBe and gives advocates and opponents the floor. Do take your time, because the podcast lasts 3 hours!
Listen to the podcast on Mosen At Large
This was our web accessibility news of March 2021. Want more news? Then also read the web accessibility news of 2020 (June | July | August | September | October | November and December) and of 2021 (January | February | April)!
People write a lot about web accessibility. We try to collect as many of these items from The Netherlands and abroad. The most striking and interesting we share on our blog every month. This way you do not have to search yourself and you are always aware of what is going on! Therefore here is the web accessibility news of February 2021!
There is a increasing need for products and services that have a positive impact on our society and planet. The time is right for companies to shift their focus from a profit-driven business model to a meaning-driven business model. The digital sector is at the heart of many of the products and services being developed and can therefore be an important catalyst in this transition to a welfare economy. Lennart Overkamp of Mirabeau writes in his article for Emerce why this pioneering role is not a utopia.
Technology and digitization will become increasingly important in the coming years. Digitization is not always prominent in the plans of the political parties in the run-up to the elections. In December’s Web Accessibility News we already wrote a news item about the lack of ambition among parties when it comes to digitization. In order to gain more insight into what parties stand for on the theme of digitization, the Stichting Toekomstbeeld der Techniek has developed a Technology Kieswijzer together with Het Nieuwe Kiezen. The accessibility of the Kieswijzer has been improved by means of a reading function and the option to receive additional explanations for each theme.
Providing live captions of spoken text is an extremely important functionality for making content accessible. Not only for people with a hearing challenge, but also when you want to follow video content in a noisy environment or when you don’t want to disturb others. Various social media have already made progress on this, such as Facebook. We previously wrote about the developments at Twitter in the Web Accessibility News of September. Live captioning of spoken text is now also possible on Google Chrome. For the time being only on a desktop and reasonably hidden in the settings, but already usable.
Read the article on Android Police
The pandemic has once again proven the importance of digital information being accessible to everyone. This has led to many lawsuits, especially in the US. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has presented a draft document as a follow-up to the WCAG 2 / 2.1: the WCAG 3.0. This is not a replacement but an addition to the current guidelines. Where the current criteria are intended to make content technically accessible, the 3.0 guidelines will be more concerned with creating and presenting that content.
This was our web accessibility news of February 2021. Want more news? Then also read the web accessibility news of 2020 (June | July | August | September | October | November and December) and of 2021 (January | March | April)!
People write a lot about web accessibility. We try to collect as many of these items from The Netherlands and abroad. The most striking and interesting we share on our blog every month. This way you do not have to search yourself and you are always aware of what is going on! Therefore here is the web accessibility news of January 2021!
Microsoft is adding more and more functionalities to Edge, causing its predecessor, Internet Explorer 11, to disappear into the background. Yet many people still use the IE11 browser. How accessible is your website if you are no longer actively developing for this older browser? Hassell Inclusion, an English digital accessibility consultant, wrote a blog about the benefits and drawbacks of accessibility if you keep developing for IE11.
Read the article on Hassell Inclusion
Since September 23, 2020, municipalities are obliged to make their websites accessible according to the WCAG or to indicate how they intend to do so. Six months later many municipal sites are still not accessible. Accessibility statements are also often lacking. The Digital Government Act, which is currently still being discussed by the Senate, stipulates that provinces will supervise the digital accessibility of municipalities and Water Authorities. Research by Knop, a collaboration of independent marketing and communication professionals, shows that only the province of Limburg has started to actively monitor municipalities. Other provinces do not know how to supervise or wait until the Act is passed.
Read the article and the research on Knop.nl
Two of the most common problems with inaccessible websites are the images and the videos. There is often a lack of alt text or captions. Designmodo, a web designer and builder has written a clear blog article on how to get started making the images and videos on your website accessible.
Read the blog article at designmodo.com
Every year, Level Access publishes the results of its research into the current state of digital accessibility. Last year we wrote an article about the results of the 2020 survey. Last year, 1,100 companies took part in the survey and Level Access wants to have a high number of respondents participate in its survey again this year. You can still participate until February 7!
Read the call from Level Access
This was our web accessibility news of January 2021. Want more news? Then also read the web accessibility news of 2020 (June | July | August | September | October | November and December) and of 2021 (February | March | April)!
People write a lot about web accessibility. We try to collect as many of these items from The Netherlands and abroad. The most striking and interesting we share on our blog every month. This way you do not have to search yourself and you are always aware of what is going on! Therefore here is the web accessibility news of December 2020!
Government organizations have recently become legally obliged to ensure that websites comply with accessibility guidelines. This does not mean that all government websites are now accessible. And a good service consists of more than just providing access. It is therefore important that governments offer the right services and that those services are clear and usable. Victor Zuydweg argues in his blog that government election programs lack a clear ambition to make government services really usable for everyone.
Read the article of Victor Zuydweg on his Blogplek
Access to healthcare is becoming increasingly digital. You can for instance make an appointment with the hospital or a healthcare professional via a patient portal. And everyone will soon have access to their own health data via a Personal Health Environment (PGO). Research by the Accessibility Foundation shows that people with a challenge or people of advanced age cannot use these applications easily or not completely. That is why it has written a Digital Accessibility Manual for developers of PGOs and patient portals.
Read the article or download the manual on Accessibility.nl
Kees Verhoeven of D66 has announced that he will be leaving the House of Representatives after 10 years. As a member of parliament he was responsible for ICT, Privacy and Cyber Security, among other things. Digitaal Toegankelijk discussed the importance of digital accessibility and the government’s tendency to be more concerned about the correctness than about the accessibility of information with Kees Verhoeven.
Read the interview on Digitaal Toegankelijk
The corona pandemic has forced many students to complete their studies online. As a result, there has been a significant increase in the use of automatic subtitles and automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology. But how accessible is this technology for deaf students to fully participate in online classrooms, meetings and extracurricular activities? Is automatic captioning comparable to manual speech-to-text services? The National Deaf Center held a webinar on this topic.
View the webinar here on YouTube
Making an existing app accessible is a costly and time-consuming process. Chris Fleizach and Sarah Herrlinger, executives at Apple, explain in an interview with TechCrunch how accessibility has become increasingly involved in the development process over the years. Accessibility on iOS is becoming more and more fundamental with technologies such as Assistive Touch, hearing accommodations, Audio Selections, Dictation, Sound Recognition and more. For example, the latest iPhone 12 Pro adds LiDAR allowing blind and partially sighted people to move freely through unfamiliar spaces.
Read the article on appleinsider.com
This was our web accessibility news of December 2020. Want more news? Then also read the web accessibility news of 2020 (June | July | August | September | October | November) and of 2021 (January | February | March | April)!
People write a lot about web accessibility. We try to collect as many of these items from The Netherlands and abroad. The most striking and interesting we share on our blog every month. This way you do not have to search yourself and you are always aware of what is going on! Therefore here is the web accessibility news of November 2020!
Despite a legal obligation that took effect on September 23, there are still many (semi-) government organizations that have not published an accessibility statement for their website. Important reasons for this are a lack of knowledge and involvement within the organizations concerned. Government agencies that do not yet have an adequate accessibility statement will be approached by the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations accessibility teams in the coming months. These teams will provide advice and also point out their obligations to the relevant authorities.
Read the article on Binnenlands Bestuur
Logius, the digital government service and part of the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, has set up a reporting point for people to mention government websites that are not yet accessible. Since September 23 of this year, governments are obliged to take measures to make their websites accessible to people with challenges. The reason for such a notification could for instance be the lack of an accessibility statement. Logius will follow up on these reports.
Read the article on Digitaleoverheid.nl
We recently wrote an article on Frankwatching about making your digital documents accessible. One of the tips was about adding alt text to your images and how to do that in Word or InDesign, for example. Microsoft has developed artificial intelligence technology to scan and describe images. This has been available for iOS since 2017: Seeing AI app. The technology behind this app will also be integrated into other Microsoft products, so blind and partially sighted people no longer rely on alt text to understand an image.
Read the article on Customer First
Content for the internet and mobile is more often offered via audio and video files. In the Netherlands alone, there are 1.3 million deaf and hard of hearing people who have difficulty following this type of content properly. Beth Worthy, director of GMR Transcription Services in America, therefore points out what to look for if you want to make audio or video accessible. In transcriptions, for example, avoid words based on sounds (e.g. whistle), because the deaf are not familiar with that sound.
The gaming industry is often a frontrunner in developing technology that optimally facilitates the user’s movement in an online environment. The developed technological applications are often applied to mainstream web environments years later. At this moment the industry makes such improvements on technology for players with challenges that these developed applications have now become the basis for the new generation of consoles. Reviews of the latest consoles therefore provide a good insight into how online services could develop in the field of accessibility in the coming years.
Read the review of Playstation 5 on IGN.com
Read the Xbox Series X review on IGN.com
This was our web accessibility news of November 2020. Want more news? Then also read the web accessibility news of 2020 (June | July | August | September |, October | December) and of 2021 (January | February | March | April)!
People write a lot about web accessibility. We try to collect as many of these items from The Netherlands and abroad. The most striking and interesting we share on our blog every month. This way you do not have to search yourself and you are always aware of what is going on! Therefore here is the web accessibility news of October 2020!
Visually challenged people sometimes have difficulty reading certain fonts. The Braille Institute in America has developed a new font that is very legible for the visually challenged. The Atkinson Hyperlegible font is named after the founder of the Braille Institute, J. Robert Atkinson. The font is more usable for partially sighted people than other fonts, because the design takes into account that letter shapes deviate from each other as much as possible. This makes characters easier to recognize and therefore easier to read.
Since September 23, governments must indicate how accessible their website is. In October, the Register of Accessibility Statements included approximately 1,800 statements. That is slightly more than a quarter of the 7,000 existing government sites. Only 5% of the published statements have a “fully compliant” status, but Capgemini research indicates that nearly half of those websites are not compliant. In October, D66 and PvdA raised quenstions in the House of Representatives about the lack of statements from government sites. The reason for this was a study that Jules Ernst and Ron Beenen carried out on the status of accessibility of government websites.
Read the article on Capgemini.com
Read the article by Ron Beenen
Most of us experience daily that corona has major social, societal and economic consequences. For blind and partially sighted people, the consequences have a much greater impact, as keeping a distance or following aisles in a store often requires good vision. ZonMW has subsidized a study that Saxion University of Applied Sciences will carry out in collaboration with Bartoméus, Oogvereniging and Koninklijke Visio, among others. This study will, together with visually and visually challenged people, examine which solutions can ensure that the 1.5 meter society remains accessible and inclusive for these target groups. The AFB, the American institute for the blind, also published a report in that describes the consequences of corona for these groups for accessibility to public transport, health care, education, food supply, employment and polling stations.
Read the assignment on ZonMW
Read the PR Newswire article
Democratic and Republican Representatives introduced a bill called the Online Accessibility Act in Congress on October 1st. This is in addition to the already existing Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). This supplement stipulates that commercial websites and apps must be accessible to people with a disability. Until now, the ADA has limited itself to commercial physical public spaces. When Congress adopts this proposal, it could lead to a significant increase in lawsuits and fines.
Read the Converge Accessibility article
More and more young people are leaving school with a language deficiency. The lack of basic skills, such as reading, can lead to low literacy. The Leescoalitie, a collaboration between organizations involved in the promotion of language and reading nationwide, is sounding the alarm and advocating an ambitious reading offensive in politics, where reading pleasure comes first. They have drawn up a manifesto for this purpose.
Read the Manifesto of the Leescoalitie
This was our web accessibility news of October 2020. Want more news? Then also read the web accessibility news of 2020 (June | July | August | September | November | December) and of 2021 (January | February | March | April)!