Roger Johansson on Website Accessibility Statements
What’s the point of an accessibility statement? If you’re reading one, you’ve almost certainly proven that the website is ‘accessible’ enough to navigate to that page!
Roger Johansson’s latest article discusses the provision and content of accessibility statements. In my experience, accessibility statements are a promotional item, a means of saying “We’ve ticked that box. Accessibility’s in the bag.”
Roger points to Standards Schmandards’ alternative: a Site Help page. This seems like a more acceptable solution - more user-centric than a ’statement’, site help would be more about informing and educating visitors than proving you’ve met some robot’s interpretation of accessibility.
On my own websites, the furthest I’ve gone in creating a special ‘accessible’ arrangement is to create hidden ‘Jump to Content’ links at the very top of each page. I don’t think it’s necessary to have a statement unless the audience specifically requires it.
Why not create an accessibility statement, then track the number of hits that page receives over time. Hell, create a ‘Site Help’ page while you’re at it and see which one is more popular.
Something which Roger omits in his post is real world investigation into whether this information is necessary at all. For a mainstream or corporate website, it might be helpful to ask visitors their opinion, either through questionnaires or focus groups. Something tells me that most disadvantaged users will already have the tools they require to access a website, while the majority of users won’t know or care about your accessibility statement.
