What is accessibility?
Web accessibility means creating experiences that can be used by all users, specifically people with disabilities. In a nutshell, all users should be able to navigate, consume, and contribute to the web.
Disabilities come in many forms and can affect how people use the web. These include auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical, speech and visual.
Web accessibility standards have been developed over the years, and continue to be improved. Lemonade bakes these accessibility standards in from the start of all our projects. This ensures that all of our clients customers are able to buy their products, enquire for more information and consume the information they are there to find.
Why accessibility matters
1 in 5 people in Australia live with some form of disability. That’s 20% of the population potentially not being able to purchase your products or use your services. Technology, products and services have all made the lives of people with disabilities easier, but there are still so many websites and online services launching without accessibility in mind.
This not only threatens the rights of disabled people across the globe, but also can have a negative impact on your business.
The other benefits of having an accessible website
In addition to making your website usable to everyone, there are some positive knock-on effects to having an accessible website.
SEO
Web Accessibility is an ever more important ranking factor to Google, it’s part of their User Experience mantra. Having a website that conforms to basic accessibility standards ultimately means you need to use coding best practices, which Google loves.
User Experience
Any website that needs to accommodate all users is generally going to be clean, easy to navigate and simple to use. You will make the lives of all your users much easier when creating a website that needs to adhere to accessibility guidelines.
It's good for business
What business doesn't want more customers? You are able to reach a wider audience when you have a website that is usable by everyone. Whether that be serving your website to a user with a poor internet connection, enabling users to use your website in bad light conditions or making your website accessible via screen readers and voice control.
Be good humans
To put it bluntly, having a website that isn't usable to everyone is discrimination. We at Lemonade understand that, and make sure all of our websites adhere to the WCAG 2.1 (AA) standard.
Our accessibility services
Here at Lemonade we are passionate about making the internet a better place for everyone. By default we bake in accessibility standards from the start of all our projects, but we also offer consulting services in addition to that.
Accessibility testing
Testing is key to building any accessible product. Whether that be using automated tools or undertaking real life user testing, it’s an integral part of the process. We measure all of our websites up to the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1) and use various automated tools to speed up the process.
Accessibility training
We can offer web accessibility training to your team, and help take the complexity out of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). We’ll show you how to create better experiences for people with disabilities, adhere to WCAG standards, and enhance the user experience for your users.
Accessibility audit
We get a great deal of satisfaction identifying issues in existing solutions and providing constructive advice to rectify those issues. We won’t just give you a list of issues that have no meaning. We’ll identify the issue, explain why it’s a problem, then offer a solution in how to fix it.
