The term accessibility implies the design of products, devices, services, or environments for individuals with disabilities. Consequently, web accessibility ensures that each person, including the ones with disabilities, has access to the web and the internet as a whole. AccessiBe is an Israeli technology company that is working towards solving the problem of web accessibility through AI. Their vision is to make the entire internet accessible by 2025 so that everyone, no matter whether they have disabilities or not, can enjoy what it has to offer.
Web accessibility through AI working towards solving:
The web and the internet are increasingly important in various aspects of modern life, including education, employment, government, and so on. Hence, it becomes important for the web to be accessible to everyone to provide equal access and opportunity to individuals with disabilities. An accessible web can aid people with disabilities to take part in society more actively. Here are some of the ways that can help in improving the accessibility aspect of a website:
AccessiBe The use of Alt-tags: The usage of alt-tag or alternative (alt) HTML is done to describe an image. Even if a person is using a visual tool that hides their HTML code to build a website, they will always get a chance to enter an image description. While the (alt=” “) can be empty, providing a helpful description for screen readers is always smarter. Considering the website visitors were blind, one must dwell on the fact that what would they need to know about the image. Just having ‘woman’ as a description is not much of a help, but ‘woman drawing design flow chart including accessibility, usability and design’ with screen readers can be a much smarter choice.
Developers building for web accessibility
Use better tables: One needs to add captions to their tables using the caption tag to make it easier to understand by screen readers, rather than simply making the table title in bold text. It will be good to add the “scope” element and subsequently label new columns and rows to the table properly so that the screen readers do not just rattle off a series of table cells without giving much context.
Keyboard navigation: Anything on a website should be something that one could conceivably carry out with just a keyboard. This means that one should not mess much with their navigation buttons. For example, they should not animate navigation buttons as dropdown buttons if they can’t be used with a screen reader.
Web Accessibility Initiative (WIP) navigation buttons
The rise of AI has allowed companies to solve issues associated with web accessibility using a product rather than a service, enabling them to make compliance in-reach for every business and drive a real accessibility revolution. Members of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WIP) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) are the ones who strive to enforce guidelines across the internet that support web accessibility.