Quick Wins for Web Accessibility

Join Natalie Garza and accessibility expert Natalie MacLees for the 25th episode of the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast, where they dive into quick wins for making websites more accessible using WCAG’s Easy Checks, designed especially for non-developers.

Natalie Garza: Hello, everybody, and welcome to the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast. This is episode 25, I’m Natalie Garza, and joining me today is,

Natalie MacLees: Natalie MacLees.

Natalie Garza: And she is an accessibility expert here to answer all of our questions. And in this episode, we’re gonna talk about quick wins for websites in terms of accessibility. So, what do we mean when we say quick wins?

Natalie MacLees: Yeah, so things that you could fix probably in just a few minutes, or things that you could at least test for very quickly and easily without having to have any kind of special equipment or special software packages or anything like that installed.

Natalie Garza: Yeah. And I would even add that quick wins also include, you don’t have to be a developer. You could do this if you’re pretty new to working with websites or new to accessibility.

Natalie MacLees: Yeah, so our list is based on the WCAG Easy Checks, which are specifically designed for non-developers. Don’t have to be technical. You don’t need any special equipment or any special software. Anybody could check these things and most people could fix most of them.

Natalie Garza: Yes, so to get started, let’s kick off the list with page titles.

Natalie MacLees: All right, so the page title is what shows up on your tab of your browser when you have a page open, and otherwise, you don’t really see it much. But it is the first thing announced to a screen reader user when they land on a page. So it is important that the page title be an accurate description of what the page is about.

Browser window showing tabs for “Aardvark – Wikipedia” and “AAArdvark | The Fastest Way” with the Wikipedia URL in the address bar.

So that if somebody lands there, they can immediately understand what this page is all about? And why would, why am I here?

Natalie Garza: Yeah, and they have to be unique, because if they go between pages and they’re the exact same, it’s super confusing.

Natalie MacLees: That’s a very good point. Yes. You want to be able to tell one page from another, just from the page titles.

Natalie Garza: All right, next on the list, image text alternatives.

Natalie MacLees: Yeah, so this is a huge topic. We could probably do a whole episode just on this, but basically, you wanna make sure that you have alternative texts for all of your images. That gives somebody the reason why the image is on the page, and if there’s any information conveyed by that image, to also convey that information.

So your alt text for the exact same image might be different on different pages, just depending on the context that the image gets used in. And generally, you wanna avoid saying things like photo of or image of, because we already know it’s an image or a photo, and you wanna keep your description short and concise. And so cut out all of that filler stuff.