Q: In your experience, what are some of the easiest or low effort website fixes that have the most impact for the disabled community?
A: Having accurate descriptions of non-text content. Anything that’s not real text, so anything that isn’t an alphabetical character on a screen needs to have some equivalent information behind it. A visual user would never know it was there, but assistive technology is relying on that coding or description and they will relay that information to a user. Alternative text, alt text, captions, and transcripts are super important.
The other big issue for assistive technology users is that a website or application must be navigated and executed with just a keyboard. A lot of people can’t use a mouse, a blind person, for instance, cannot use a mouse. If you want to see if your website or application works without a mouse, unplug your mouse and try to complete the purchase of an item, register for a webinar or any of the things that we normally do. We typically don’t think about how a user would interact without a mouse. So those are some specific but not too hard of things to make sure that are implemented correctly.