The World of Accessibility

As a fiction writer and poet who also has a career in communications that has gone from theatre to local government to higher education to a non-profit; I’ve seen a lot of information and a lot of content about so many different things. But the area that has always had my heart is accessibility.

Having gone from organisations where it was an integral part of their mission to those where I have had to fight for the importance of accessibility has been disappointing considering how integral and relevant it is to all of us. It’s also disappointing to see projects you worked on launch with issues they didn’t have when you were working on them.

It’s especially frustrating because ignoring accessibility means ignoring a large potential audience who could get so much value from what you do. It’s a no-brainer on a moral level and even if that wasn’t enough to persuade some senior leaders, it’s a no-brainer on a financial and reputational level too. So why there are organisations that don’t believe it is a priority for them or that they’re special in having too many challenges to face to solve their accessibility failings is beyond me.

But let’s start at the beginning.

What is accessibility

There are a lot of ways accessibility has been used in the past, most people perceive it in terms of something being able to be reached, obtained, or understood easily or in the context of physically disabled people being able to get into a building. That’s still accurate, but the idea of accessibility has expanded considerably to include the digital space and many more things than physical disability.

In 2022/23, nearly 25% of the UK population identified themselves as having a disability (about 16.1 million people). This only covers long term disabilities which generally fall into the categories of physical, sensory, intellectual, and mental disabilities so for example, mobility impairments, depression, autism, dyslexia, blindness, deafness, and so on.

Some of these disabilities have minor impacts on people’s lives, for example, in 2020 about 59% of the UK population (40 million) have some form of eyesight issues and require glasses to correct them. Outside of needing to wear glasses, there is no major impact on their lives. About 3 million people are estimated to be colour-blind, which affects how people move through the world but in most instances it isn’t too limiting.

Other disabilities have a much larger impact and can severely limit what people can and cannot do. There are an estimated 1.2 million people in the UK who use wheelchairs. If there is no ramp into a building, they will struggle to enter it. If there’s no lift, they will struggle to get up to the second floor. If a corridor is too narrow, they won’t be able to go through it.

This doesn’t even take into consideration the fact that some people are temporarily disabled. Think of those who have broken their arm and need it safe in a cast for a few months. It also doesn’t take into consideration those who a situationally disabled. Think of all the times you’ve been unable to look at your phone screen because the glare of the sun is too much.

Accessibility as it is used now, is about ensuring that something can be used by everyone no matter their specific needs. There are many things we can do on websites and mobile apps and that we can do in physical spaces to make the lives of those with access needs easier, but they also typically help everybody else too. It’s all about inclusion, not exclusion. And outside of a few areas (it’s near impossible to put a lift in a small centuries old building or to have accurately converted every planning application from the last 70 years into easy-to-read digital formats), it’s actually very easy and relatively inexpensive to solve a lot of these issues.

For the web, we have the W3C Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) which are receiving regular updates to ensure best practice as technologies evolve and our abilities to support those with access needs grows (we are currently on version 2.2 with version 3.0 currently in draft form).

We are failing

Every year WebAIM conduct an accessibility evaluation of the homepages of the top 1 million websites. 94.8% of these homepages failed to meet the WCAG 2 standards despite the fact that the USA, the EU, and the UK all have legislation which requires conformance to these standards and is only getting stricter as time progresses.

The issue is, the same errors come up time and time again. Low contrast text, missing alternative text for images, missing labels, empty links and buttons (links that don’t go anywhere), issues with heading structures and more.

What does this mean in practice? It means people can’t read the text. It means people who use screen readers can’t understand what your images are for or what your forms are asking them. It means people are clicking links and buttons that don’t go anywhere. And all of that is also negatively impacting the SEO (search engine optimisation) of the site as more search engine algorithms are prioritising web accessibility.

We see much the same challenges in real world settings. I can’t count the number of articles and social media posts I’ve seen about wheelchair users being unable to get off a train because the step-free support they requested wasn’t provided or guide-dog users have been turned away from entering a hotel or a restaurant.

In the UK, the Equality Act 2010 is intended to prevent these types of issues and disability is very clearly stated as one of the nine protected characteristics.

So why are so many still failing?

The basics

There are some very easy, basic tools and techniques you can use when trying to make anything accessible on a digital platform:

• Logical structures
• Plain English
• Colour contrast
• Context and descriptions
• Multiple formats

I’ve always highlighted that it’s easier to make something accessible if you make it so as you build it, but it’s not impossible to fix. If you’re unsure if a website has any issues, you can use any number of free tools like WAVE by WebAim or the Chrome AXE developer tools to find them on a page-by-page basis or work with providers who can audit your entire site. Each tool has their own quirks and there are a number of WCAG guidelines that require manual checks, but these tools will likely get you most of the way there.

So, let’s break down how to fix the basics:

Logical Structures

Lots of text in one block can be difficult to read. It’s why we split things into sentences and paragraphs. It’s also why we tend to have shorter paragraphs on the web. But there’s another tool we use to break things down further: Headings.

If you’re using Word, you’ll see them in your Styles bit of the toolbar, if you’re on a Content Management System (CMS) you’ll typically see them under a style drop down. These start at Heading 1 (H1) and they go down through the numbers.

In both documents and on the web, these headings provide helpful visual markers which also allow users to jump between different sections of the page and highlight the context of a section. For users with access needs, these headings can be vital. Each heading level indicates what that section relates to.

So for this very article, the title ‘The World of Accessibility’ is a Heading 1; our sub-sections like ‘The basics’ are Heading 2, and all of these relate to our Heading 1 subject; but then we have sub-sub-sections like this for ‘Logical structures’ which is a Heading 3, which specifically relates to its Heading 2 parent. Each level is a like a child to its parent. And this is something screen readers rely on to assist people in navigating pages.

Issues most commonly occur when heading levels are missed or skipped, because it’s not clear what information relates to anything; or when heading levels are used for purely aesthetic purposes, because it confuses the structure of a page, provides no context to the information below it, or results in whole sentences and paragraphs acting as headings and making no sense.

That’s a long explanation, but the solution is easy.

When creating any page or document, using a logical heading structure. Start with Heading 1 (H1) for your title and then all subsequent headings should be Heading 2 (H2) and so on.

Don’t skip heading levels (so don’t go from H3 to H5) and only use heading styles on the things that are actually headings.

The Home Office Design System has a great more detailed explainer on how to use Headings properly.

Plain English

In most businesses and sectors, we are prone to using over-complex language and excessive acronyms. Every job I’ve ever had has required an education in at least 20 regularly used acronyms that are often specific to that organisation but no others.

In 2022 it was estimated that in the UK, 7.1 million adults read at, or below, the level of an average 9 year old. But you have a mixture of those with learning disabilities or cognitive issues and those whose first language isn’t English. Even people with high reading levels prefer shorter, clearer sentences.

So just use plain English. Be simple, clear, and concise. If you need to use an acronym, explain. If you need to use jargon, explain it.

Check out the Home Office Guidance on readability

Colour Contrasts

If you have some form of colour-blindness, you will already know how difficult it can be to see the difference between things if they’re only differentiated by colour. If you’re red-green colour-blind, how are you meant to know the difference between red failure text and green success text if that’s the only difference between them? How are you supposed to know whether you’re putting your green bin out or your brown bin when they look the same?

Equally, some colours are just impossible to read or see against certain backgrounds, think bright yellow on a white background. Even if you don’t have vision issues, those kinds of colour contrasts can cause migraines and all sorts.

The solution is to use one of the many free colour contrast checker tools to make sure the colours your using have a big enough contrast to meet the WCAG guidelines. The minimum for AA compliance is 4.5:1 although if you want AAA compliance you should aim for 7:1. I’ve found the Eight Shapes Contrast Grid to be particularly useful for testing combinations.

You might think that this limits what colours you can use, but it really doesn’t. You just need to be smarter about your colour combinations. And if you’re brand colour palette turns out to be more limited than you thought, maybe it’s time to update it to be more accessible and give you more options.

Check out the Home Office Design System guidance for colour and contrast

Context and Descriptions

Everyone know that a link is something you click to go to somewhere else on a website or to a different site. But the way you write those links can make or break how useful they are, especially to users with screen readers.

‘Click Here’, ‘Read More’, ‘Find Out More’ are all terms you will see across the web and in emails too. But they’re meaningless. For starters, some people aren’t using a mouse so they can’t actually click on anything; but also there’s no context to them. What I’m I clicking for? What am I reading more about? Yes a person with no sight issues will likely be able to determine the relevance from the text or images around the link, but for everybody else it’s useless.

Screen readers are typically able to skip between the various links on a page, so they need to know what the link is sending them to. Better link text is something like ‘Find out more about Richard Kish’ or ‘Discover Richard’s books’. Yes, there’s a challenge in providing enough context without making a link overly long, but it’s worth it. It also just makes life easier for everyone.

Check out Home Office Design System guidance for Links

In a way, images are similar. If you’re putting important information or relevant information in an image but not giving it what is called alt text (basically a description in the code of a website which a screen reader can read) means that people with sight-issues or cognitive impairments can’t access that information.

All you need to do is convey the meaning of the image. This might be as simple as describing a company logo or describing a photo in an article. You’ve probably also seen the images of quotes on social media, and in those circumstances, you’d want to include that text in the alt text. Though it’s generally recommended to avoid lots of text in images.

Check out the Home Office Design System guidance for Images

Multiple Formats

A blind person cannot read text, so they may need something providing as audio, in braille, or as a physical model. A deaf person might need subtitles on a video or they might need a sign-language version of that video.

One of the most helpful things you can do is provide information in multiple formats. This is arguably the biggest challenge for most organisations as outside of providing large-text copies of information, there is an extra cost to deliver these.

You should always advocate for delivering information in as many ways as possible, but where it isn’t, you should just try your best. If someone with a specific need you haven’t covered wants to access that information, you can always ask them to get in touch with you to discuss options. In this way, you’re meeting your user needs but not wasting money and time on formats that your users don’t need.

Welcome to the World of Accessibility

So, you’ve had a proper introduction to the world of accessibility as it stands right now. Hopefully you can see the importance of accessibility and how easy it actually is to solve the majority of problems.

Yes, it may take time to fix a large backlog of content.

Yes, there might be some more complex issues which require some greater expertise to fix.

But it’s really not that hard.

Today, Thursday 15 May 2025, is the 14th Global Accessibility Awareness Day. We should not still be failing people in the way that we are. In the nine years of my communications career, accessibility has formed a large part of my work and I am baffled at how little awareness there still is about it.

So now that you know, let’s work together to do better.