What Web Accessibility is

Web accessibility is the practice of making websites usable for every user. It involves following set standards which ensure that differently-abled people have the same or a similar experience as others. When websites and web tools are designed and coded properly, differently-abled people can use them seamlessly.

According to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international community where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards,

The Web is fundamentally designed to work for all people, whatever their hardware, software, language, location, or ability. When the Web meets this goal, it is accessible to people with a diverse range of hearing, movement, sight and cognitive abilities.

What Web Accessibility isn't

In the process of learning about Web Accessibility, one can easily misunderstand what it is by limiting it to just being about designing and developing websites for differently-abled people. With the quote from W3C above, one can see that a person's health status ( for instance, visual impairment, total loss of vision etc ) isn't the only factor one should consider.

If some users of your site are okay healthwise but cannot access the content of your page because they use a mobile device and your page is not responsive, it is not accessible to them. If others can not understand the content of your site because it is in a language they do not understand and you made no provision for them to have it translated, it is not accessible to them.

So the scope of accessibility goes way beyond what we think it is at first glance.

Why Accessibility should be thought of in the ideation phase of building a project

During a Coffee chat with one of my mentors at Jupyter, he mentioned something that struck me and will keep ringing in my head. He said most of the health challenges we categorize as being differently-abled (visual impairment and other neurological disorders) come with ageing.

So when we build accessible products, we are building for our future selves. Eventually, we will be using what we build and we will experience all the issues we overlook firsthand.