Africa’s accessibility community

When websites are designed and developed without accessibility in mind then it creates barriers for people with disabilities. There are design and development principles that must be followed to achieve full inclusion. Before designing, we need to understand the needs of all the users of the product that we are about to develop. Understanding the diverse needs of people with various disabilities will help cover major product requirements at the beginning of the project life cycle.

Design: Accessibility principles should be incorporated throughout the entire design process. This includes the ideation stage all the way through the testing stage. Applying accessibility design guidelines when creating user flows to selecting your user personas allows UX and UI designers to build products that are born accessible. In the design phase, we must think about issues of color contrast between background and foreground, ensuring that interactive elements are easily identifiable. For example, providing different link or button styles for different states. Designers should also include accessibility as a core part of their design system. This will make sure they implement clear and consistent navigation options, associated labels, headings and spacing, image and media alternatives, automation of content, and various viewport sizes (responsiveness).

Development: For a web application to be accessible, accessibility must be included from the start of a project to avoid the high costs associated with retrofitting or adding accessibility later. Accessible websites ensure that everyone including people with disabilities have better user experiences.

Developers must associate a label with every form control, include alternative text for images, identify page language and language changes, use semantic mark-up to convey meaning and structure, and use WAI-ARIA roles to provide additional meaning. Developers help users avoid mistakes from the beginning by verifying that all interactive elements are keyboard accessible and that the reading order reflects the code order.

Accessibility Testing: Involving people with different disabilities during application testing is critical. People with disabilities cannot be replaced by automated tools and processes. Their feedback will help identify accessibility issues before the product is launched. In addition, compliance testing must be performed based on the testable criteria for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1 A, AA, AAA).