Your Awareness: Before this week it never really occurred to me that websites had to follow web accessibility guidelines. I never really thought about the challenges faced by people with disabilities when it comes to navigating websites. I think one of the main things that surprised me was just how many errors most websites have when it comes to accessibility. Especially with guidelines that have such specific regulations, it seemed like a lot of websites had a high number of errors.
Barriers & Breakthroughs: I encountered a piece of content that was not accessible when I created my own website through neocities. My website included multiple images that were used as links but lacked alternative text. For a sighted user, the purpose of the images was clear, but for anyone using a screen reader, the links were essentially invisible. My website also had multiple contrast errors, where the text color was too similar to the background color, making it difficult to see for people with vision impairments.
Multimedia Impacts: Web accessibility intersects with multimedia content by ensuring that video, audio and graphic stories can be successfully navigated by disabled audiences. I think the biggest challenge in making multimedia content accessible is having web platforms follow all of the guidelines that are recommended for accessibility. I imagine most multimedia platforms want to create their own unique design and format, and having specific rules that can heavily influence the design of a website can disrupt or even ruin what some web designers are looking to achieve.
Your Accessibility Commitments: If I was producing a feature-rich story for a news organization, the three specific accessibility features I would prioritize would be contrast errors, alt text for images, and transcripts for videos. I think from both a technical and editorial perspective, these three accessibility features ensure that people with hearing, vision, and learning disabilities would be able to in some way access the content and be able to understand it.
After learning about the importance of web accessibility, I think it’s something that more of the population should develop a general understanding of. Most of the websites that I visit overlook a lot of the aspects of what makes a website accessible, and I feel like those with disabilities would benefit if more people took the time to understand the importance of these guidelines.