Okay, I should have asked, is this gonna have captions? Yes. Amazing. Hi everyone, my name is Alison Walden. I'm a Senior Director of Technology at Publicis Sapient, and I also lead our Accessibility Center of Excellence. And today, I will be answering some questions about accessibility from the internet.
So AJ Contrast on Twitter asks, how inaccessible is the digital world to people with disabilities? Well, the answer, unfortunately, is quite inaccessible. I like to use statistics from an accessibility services company called WebAIM. And what they did is they used an automated testing tool to test the top million most popular websites on the internet. Only 1-2% of the websites that they found were accessible. About 15% of the world has some kind of permanent disability, so around a billion people. And you consider that only 1-2% of the web content is accessible for that massive audience. It's pretty depressing, actually. A critical component to creating accessible experiences is having people on the team who understand how assistive technology works.
A user called AtSignQAInfotech on Twitter asks, what are the most common issues that we find while web accessibility testing? The most common issues that I find are that functionality doesn't work with the keyboard alone. So, you know, something might work when I trigger the action with my mouse, but if I try and trigger that same action with my keyboard, it just won't work. And that's probably because the developer didn't test with their keyboard. Contrast, which is a really easy issue to fix in design phase, so that means that the text against the background isn't perceivable enough for people to be able to read the text. Another common issue that I find while web accessibility testing are that the link labels don't describe the purpose of the link. So they'll say something vague like, you know, read more, learn more. Commonly on an interface, an edit button has a little pencil icon on it. I'll discover that the user experience person didn't define what the announced label is supposed to be for a screen reader user. And if you hear... Button. Image. Pencil. That doesn't really convey the action of the button, which is to edit.
At Kent C. Dodds on Twitter asks... Oh, and then there's lots of different styled formatting in this tweet. You think it's cute to write your tweets and usernames this way, but have you listened to what it sounds like with assistive technologies like voiceover? Great. Can't wait to hear how this sounds. Edit text. U. Mathematical sans serif italic small t. Mathematical sans serif italic small h. Mathematical sans serif italic small 1. Mathematical sans serif italic small n. Mathematical sans serif italic small k. H. Mathematical script small c. Mathematical script small u. Mathematical script small t e 2. Mathematical sans serif old small d. Mathematical sans serif old small r. All right, I think we got it. And this is a fantastic call out. A lot of things that we do look good for a sighted user, but they just sound terrible when they're announced by voiceover. And actually, if I could add another one to the mix, it's the vertical line character. Very popular character to use in titles of web pages or product names on an e-commerce site. It'll have like the brand name and then that vertical line character and then the product name itself. But what the screen reader does is it says vertical line. It's just not what anyone would have intended. And probably if the writer listened to how it sounded, they would say, oh, I don't want it to say vertical line. But since they never test it with their screen reader, they just have no idea that that's what it says. I love this tweet. I'm going to repost this later.
User named u slash David Picorazzi1 on Reddit asks, what are some sites or mobile apps that do accessibility right? A really great place to start if you're looking for accessible websites or applications are government websites. Governments like the US government, they need to make their websites accessible. The Canadian government has an accessible website. So that's probably a good place to start.
Some people searching on Google ask, how do I start a career in accessibility? It's another great question. Everyone can be a practitioner of accessibility and should be. So a lot of the accessibility practitioners who I know are front end developers, or at least they started as front end developers. However, you don't need to be a front end developer. If you're a user experience designer, a person who writes content for the web online, there are so many best practices that you can learn and follow. Like it seems intimidating. It seems like there's a lot to know. But really, once you start doing it and practicing it on a daily basis, you get used to doing it.
A user named U slash 1 ACY5Kers at on Reddit wants to know, why do you work on accessibility? It's a great question. I work on accessibility because I'm passionate in my belief that all content and services that are available online should be available to everyone, no matter how they need to navigate. It's a human right.