Many Finns urgently need accessible digital services, and almost everyone would benefit from them. But what is accessibility and why should we care about it? In practice, nearly every Finn encounters accessibility challenges at least occasionally from accessibility problems, i.e. difficulty using a digital service and completing the desired action. It can be a tax return, banking, booking a travel ticket or buying groceries from an online store.
Well-designed digital services and clear user interfaces are also useful for those experiencing temporary accessibility challenges. A noisy environment or bright sunshine often makes it difficult to use a smartphone or laptop. A hand in a cast can make it difficult to use a mouse or touchpad. In other words, accessibility is not just about the digital skills, visual impairments, motor limitations, or cognitive problems of the elderly. Every Finn would benefit from well-implemented and accessible digital services.
Accessibility and the Digital Services Act
The Digital Services Act lays down provisions on accessibility requirements that apply to some digital services. In addition to the websites of public operators, the accessibility requirements also include, for example, some online stores. The first section of the Digital Services Act (306/2019) describes the purpose of the Act as follows:
“The purpose of this Act is to promote the availability, quality, information security and accessibility of digital services and thus improve everyone’s opportunities to use digital services equally.”
Equal access to a website, for example, means that the website can be used by assistive technology that allows people with severe visual impairments to interpret the content of the website. In other words, accessibility refers to the usability of the content of the website. It should be possible to navigate the site with just keyboard commands, and images should have text alternatives, unless they are just decorative elements. In this case, they must be marked with an empty description text (alt=””). The text must be large enough, and when choosing colors, it should be taken into account that the text stands out sufficiently from the background color.
WCAG guidelines define accessibility requirements
The quality requirements for all accessible digital services – which also include documents and applications – are recorded in the WCAG 2.1 guidelines (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). Link to WCAG 2.1 guidelines.
The accessibility of the digital service is examined by auditing it, which means comparing the site’s functions with the WCAG 2.1 success criteria. After the audit, an accessibility statement is drawn up for the website, which is attached to an easy-to-find place on the website. According to the law, the company providing the service can also carry out the audit itself, but it requires knowledge of assistive technologies. Typically, a site audit uses several of the following software: NVDA, Jaws, TalkBack, VoiceOver, or Microsoft Narrator. These are examples of software used by the visually impaired and blind to read text.
Caring about accessibility means caring about your own customers
Accessibility should be an automatic part of building all online content. Accessibility doesn’t exclude anyone; it benefits everyone. In practice, a company’s disregard for accessibility means the same as prohibiting one in five customers from entering a brick-and-mortar store. That is putting customers in an unequal position. Conversely, by taking care of accessibility, the company says that it values every potential customer equally.
Accessibility improves search engine rankings and has been shown to boost sales
From the point of view of Google’s search engine ranking, for example, the compliance of the company’s website with the WCAG guidelines is a significant matter. It improves the value of the site and may lift it past a poorly implemented competing site.
The impact of accessibility on the sales volumes of online stores has been studied for at least ten years. According to the Click Away Pound interview study conducted in England, accessibility clearly improves the sales of online stores and reduces cart abandonment. If you want to know more about the business impact of accessibility, check out the Click-Away Pound study. Link to the Click-Away Pound 2019 study.
The article was written by certified accessibility expert Jyri Hokkinen.