Accessibility part 2: How Sitevision supports

Who is responsible for the accessibility of your website or intranet?

In our last post, we encouraged you to appoint someone in your organization to take responsibility for accessibility. Someone who learns and trains themselves as well as their colleagues and guides the work. Ultimately, of course, the responsibility lies with you, you who create content and publish information to visitors and users. Sitevision as a product house also bears responsibility, we are responsible for ensuring that standard modules and standard functions meet the requirements and finally our partners, or the person who built your solution, bear responsibility. The responsibility thus falls on you, on Sitevision and on any partner you use. It is therefore very important that you ensure that accessibility is a factor in future procurements.

Avoid simple mistakes

Once you have a strategy for the work, once someone is designated responsible for your accessibility work, what do you do next? Of course, you need to build a picture of the scope of the work. There are many ways forward here. A first step you can take is to order an accessibility report. This is a built-in feature of Sitevision. The accessibility check checks for simple errors and links to the pages where the errors are found. You activate the accessibility check in the website settings under the Accessibility category. To do this, administrator access is required.

Heading levels

There is a clear set of rules when it comes to setting headings on a web page. Basically, the rule is as follows: a page can have one main heading. This is often called Heading 1 and is printed in the code as h1. Once a page has a main heading, it is then used up. The next level of headings will therefore be Level 2 heading, printed as h2 in the code. You can use it several times. After heading 2, you can choose to either continue with a heading at the same level, or move on to a heading level 3, h3 in the code. However, you may not skip heading levels. Why is this important then? Assistive technology needs a proper structure to provide the visitor with the assistance they need. As a bonus, it's also good from a search optimization perspective, so don't cheat here.

The accessibility checker will react if you skip heading levels and print this as an error message.

Validation check

The code behind your website is just as important as the content you create. Sitevision has a built-in validation check that is also a really good tool as it warns of errors in code and scripts. If a validation error appears when you publish a page, you should therefore investigate what this is due to. In many cases, the action is beyond your control, but make sure the errors are fixed. The validation check appears in the publishing dialog, and you activate the function in the website settings, under the Accessibility category.

Alt-texts

In Sitevision, there is a feature called "extended accessibility support". This support ensures that you add an alt text to images you place on a page. A good alt text describes the image and its purpose. Writing a good text can sometimes be difficult, but one way to practice is to imagine yourself describing the image to someone over the phone. What is particularly significant about the image? If the picture is of people working at a computer, a good example might be "Two people working at a computer." This paints a picture of the image, doesn't it? Also, keep in mind that the alt text will be read out, so don't forget to put a period.

The fact that Google and other search engines then use the alt text to better understand what the image represents, which can influence image searches, is a big bonus.

Link texts

A classic in the context of accessibility is the way we write link texts. In Sitevision, you can add a link description when you need to use link texts such as "Click here" or "Read more". But hopefully you already know that we should avoid that type of link text. Varying link texts is not only accessible but also creates clarity in your structure. Visitors, with or without disabilities, will have a better understanding of where they are going if the link text actually describes the landing page.

In Sitevision, the accessibility checker checks generic link texts like "click here" and warns you when you try to express yourself that way. A good tip is to think of the link text as the headline of the content the visitor comes to. Instead of linking only part of the text, such as "Learn more about our services: here", you can write "Learn more about the services we offer". It will be clearer.

Simple hygiene factors such as headings, alt texts and link texts are fairly easy to fix. In the next post, we will look at how you can label the roles of different objects in Sitevision.