Other attributes
Web accessibility ensures all people, including those with disabilities, are able to interact with, understand, and navigate the web. Web accessibility's definition has also recently been expanding to ensure the inclusion of aging adults, rural communities, and developing countries.
Historically, web accessibility has focused on ensuring access for individuals with disabilities. Due to legal requirements and a growing market of users, companies have focused on ensuring access for those that require accommodations for auditory, cognitive/neurological, physical, speech, and visual impairments or disabilities. These accommodations for a smaller population of the world have increased access to the web for the general population and hence created an even greater demand on the market. Accessibility features such as screen brightness, zoom features, text-to-speech or speech-to-text have become popular features for the general population.
Web accessibility perspectives and examples
Each government has its own regulations in place regarding accessibility, and these laws were typically written regarding physical accessibility. However, with the integration of the web into the daily lives of individuals, many cases of discrimination have been successful regarding web accessibility. In the United States, this is an often debated topic as there are not specific laws regarding digital accessibility. The Americans with Disabilities Act, as well as Section 504 and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, are most commonly referred to when debating this industry.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is the most-cited law in regards to web accessibility compliance. This is because the ADA prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in places of public accommodation, and websites are increasingly interpreted in legal cases as places of public accommodation. The Department of Justice (DOJ) has reaffirmed that the ADA does apply to websites as well. https://www.rev.com/blog/web-accessibility-laws-in-the-u-s
No technical standards have been laid out in order to meet the compliance discussed above. In most cases, if the product/site in question is perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust, it will meet the accessibility criteria legally. These are vague descriptors, and there is a significant increasing demand due to both legal and industry needs. In order to create technical standards, a set of criteria has been created to assist in moving towards universal accessibility while giving companies and creators concrete ways to move forward with them.
This is where the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) comes into play. WCAG was created "in cooperation with individuals and organizations around the world, with a goal of providing a single shared standard for web content accessibility that meets the needs of individuals, organizations, and governments internationally."
The WCAG is primarily created for web content developers, authoring tool developers, web accessibility tool developers, and any other technical web professionals requiring standards to meet accessibility requirements. It contains technical resources, standards, and documentation to meet the most up-to-date accessibility requirements around the globe.
Web accessibility is a necessity moving forward both legally and to promote the growth of online sales. For the past three years, WebAim completed an analysis of the top 1,000,000 websites utilizing the WAVE Stand-Alone API. The most recent study in 2021 found 97.4% of the homepages analyzed had detectable WCAG2 errors.
Lack of web accessibility can not only cost companies in terms of legal fees, but it was also estimated in a study completed by Nucleus Research in 2019 that "US e-commerce retailers may be losing up to $6.9 billion annually to their competitors with more accessible websites."
