What's Accessibility, Tho?
Published: 2021-02-15 04:07:33

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###Introduction
Let’s say you were in charge of introducing a brand new currency into your country.  It consists of four different coins, each having different values.  How would you physically design these coins such that the introduction of this new currency is maximally successful?

###Human Centered Design and Its Effects
In Britain, in 1971, a very similar situation was at hand.  The British government was faced with the task of introducing a brand new set of coins to correspond with its new currency.  To help carry out the design of these new coins, Britain invested in research into what makes a coinage system successful.  One of the things the researchers discovered was that the coins should be designed such that any given coin could be identified by touch alone.  This may sound rather unsurprising -- after all, we all carry our coins around in our pockets, or perhaps in a purse or wallet of some sort.  But, if phrased differently, this insight can act as a nearly infinite source of design wisdom.  Allow me to propose the following generalization:

Designing for those who lack certain senses can provide unforeseen benefits that propagate outward, even to those who do not lack such senses

Now this statement is a bit more surprising.  In fact, this statement was possibly the most profound insight I took away from my reading of the first few chapters of Frank Ritter’s Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems.  There is much, much more that Ritter has to offer in his book, and so if you found this particular case to be uniquely interesting, I encourage you to purchase Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems.  Also, as a disclaimer, I am in no way affiliated with any publisher or author of this publication, it’s just a genuinely good book that has a lot of great insights to offer.

In general, though, it focuses on the concept of Human-Centered Design, which is no new or surprising concept.  Obviously, if we design things for humans to use, an integral part of the design of such things are the human users themselves.  But, much like our coinage example, Human-Centered Design can provide some incredibly beautiful insights into the design of things; and not to mention, as a field, Human-Centered Design is a very elegant intersection of various fields of study, including psychology, engineering, computer science, and more.

###Accessibility on the Web
With all this being said, what principles of Human-Centered Design does the web have to offer?  Is the internet designed to be used and operated by all, or is there still progress to be made in this regard?  Well, one massive initiative throughout the history of the internet has been the push for accessibility.  Accessibility is a broad term which involves a number of considerations on various levels, but in a general sense, accessibility directly mirrors the concept that was revealed to us in our coinage example.  Accessibility generally involves the design of user-interfaces with a focus on those who are impaired in some area of perception or function.  This may include anything from total blindness to lack of motor function.

There are many technologies and software techniques that support accessibility.  For example, user interfaces which are higher in terms of their color contrast are easier for those who have some visual impairment to perceive.  Furthermore, those with total blindness may use a screen reader, or perhaps a braille reader hardware component to perceive webpage text.  Also, those with auditory impairments may read closed captions when viewing videos on the internet.

One of the main ways that the web approaches accessibility is through its support of ARIA, which is an acronym for the Web Accessibility Initiative’s Accessible Rich Internet Applications specification.  ARIA defines a set of properties that can be given values in HTML, and even adjusted dynamically using JavaScript.  These values describe the text that should be read off by a screen reader when an object is in focus, they specify implied relationships between objects, and much more.

###How Accessibility and SEO are Closely Connected
All things considered, accessibility may still be a tough sell for many people.  After all, development is a costly practice, and to a corporate executive, it could be difficult to comprehend the immediate value in pouring so much time and effort into serving a small subset of a given application’s stakeholders.  That said, much like our coinage example from earlier, accessibility has some significant, and relatively unforeseen benefits that propagate outward beyond the stakeholders that it intends to serve.

Perhaps most significantly, accessibility, when implemented correctly into a webpage, increases the page’s search engine optimization immensely.  Search engines like Google and Yahoo incentivise accessibility, and the more accessible your page is, the higher it is likely to be ranked by search engines.  In addition, designing a web page for accessibility inherently requires programmers to include relevant, and elegant descriptions of their HTML tags so that they can be interpreted by screen readers, and other technologies which promote accessibility.

###How to Know Whether Your SEO or Accessibility Should Be Improved
So, let’s say you have a webpage, and you’re interested in improving its SEO, and/or its relative accessibility.  Where should you start?  Well, I recommend looking into two tools which support the measurement and improvement of Accessibility and SEO.  First, we have the WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation tool.  This tool allows its users to input a URL to a webpage, and it measures the accessibility of the page by identifying accessibility errors, alerting the user of potential concerns, and pointing out where the site succeeds in making itself accessible by all users.  Next, we have web.dev, which is a Google-owned project that measures the overall effectiveness of a webpage by gauging its performance, accessibility, best practices, and search engine optimization.

If you own a website, or if you are developing one, and you are at all interested in increasing its accessibility and its SEO, I encourage you to look into both of these tools, and to implement their feedback into your website.  Not only will this result in a more accessible webpage, but it will increase your search rankings, and ultimately result in more traffic, and more revenue.