Legacy website accessibility remediation – a step-by-step guide to prioritizing fixes
Learn how to prioritize accessibility fixes for your legacy website with our step-by-step guide to remediation.
Addressing legacy website accessibility issues becomes increasingly important as organizations make an effort to provide inclusive digital experiences while also meeting legal (e.g., ADA or EAA ) online accessibility obligations. This tutorial describes an organized approach for effectively prioritizing and implementing accessibility changes.
Understanding accessibility remediation
Accessibility remediation involves identifying and correcting issues that hinder individuals, including those with disabilities, from accessing digital content. The process aligns websites with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which provide a framework for making content accessible to users with various disabilities, including visual, auditory, cognitive, and motor impairments.
Challenges in remediating legacy websites
Remediating legacy websites presents unique challenges:
- Outdated codebases: many legacy sites are built on outdated frameworks, contain non-semantic HTML or missing native, built-in the browser elements, making it difficult to implement modern accessibility practices without significant rewrites.
- Limited resources: effective remediation often requires collaboration among software engineers, designers, and accessibility experts. This can strain resources, especially in smaller organizations. What helps in developing accessible apps is to use native, built-in browser elements that are native HTML elements, such as buttons, inputs, selects, details, and checkboxes. These elements are natively supported by the browser and automatically accessible, for example, for keyboard users or to screen readers and other assistive technologies.
- Balancing usability and aesthetics: some accessibility fixes may alter the visual design of the site. It is essential to find a balance between compliance and maintaining an appealing user interface.
Step-by-step remediation process
Step 1: Audit
Conduct a comprehensive accessibility audit to assess your website’s current compliance status.
Use an automatic auditing tool
Utilize accessibility checker tools, like SiteLint, to identify basic violations quickly. Automatic audit tools can quickly scan a website or application for accessibility issues, saving time and effort compared to manual testing.
By integrating automatic audit tools into the development process, accessibility issues can be identified and addressed early on, reducing the risk of costly rework later on.
It is worth mentioning that automation does not catch all accessibility violations (mostly due to the technical limitations in the auditing process) in your content, but it can assist you in quickly auditing pages for accessibility violations and creating a list of issues from which to work and fix to make your legacy content more accessible than before.
However, it’s essential to note that automatic audit tools should not replace manual testing entirely. Human testers can provide valuable insights into the user experience and identify issues that may not be detectable by automated tools. A combination of both automatic and manual testing is often the most effective approach to ensuring accessibility.
Manual testing
Engaging experienced accessibility experts for thorough evaluations is a crucial step in ensuring that a product, website, or application is accessible to people with disabilities. These experts can provide a comprehensive evaluation of the accessibility of a product, identifying issues that may not be caught by automated tools or internal testing.
Accessibility experts can conduct a thorough evaluation of a product, including manual testing, user research, and technical analysis, to identify accessibility issues that may not be caught by automated tools.
Manual testing in accessibility involves a range of activities, including:
- Screen reader testing: testing a product or website with a screen reader to ensure that it is readable and navigable by users who are blind or have low vision.
- Keyboard-only navigation: testing a product or website using only a keyboard to ensure that it is navigable by users who are unable to use a mouse.
- High contrast testing: testing a product or website with high contrast settings to ensure that it is readable by users with visual impairments.
- Zoom testing: testing a product or website with zoom settings to ensure that it is readable by users with visual impairments.
- Colorblind testing: testing a product or website with colorblind filters to ensure that it is readable by users with color vision deficiency.
- User testing: testing a product or website with users with disabilities to identify accessibility issues and gather feedback on the user experience.
Manual testing in accessibility is an essential step in ensuring that a product, website, or application is accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities. It can help identify issues that may not be caught by automated tools and provide valuable insights into the user experience.
Manual testing can be performed using a range of tools and techniques, including:
- Assistive technologies: such as screen readers, braille displays, and keyboard-only navigation tools.
- Accessibility checklists: such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) checklist.
- User testing protocols: such as user testing scripts and participant recruitment guidelines.
User feedback
User feedback is a crucial component of the accessibility testing process. It involves gathering feedback from users with disabilities to identify accessibility issues and improve the overall user experience.
Here are some ways user feedback can be incorporated into the accessibility testing process:
- User testing sessions: conducting user testing sessions with participants who have disabilities to gather feedback on the accessibility of a product, website, or application.
- Surveys and questionnaires: distributing surveys and questionnaires to users with disabilities to gather feedback on their experiences with a product, website, or application.
- Focus groups: conducting focus groups with users with disabilities to gather feedback and discuss accessibility issues.
- One-on-one interviews: conducting one-on-one interviews with users with disabilities to gather in-depth feedback on their experiences.
- Online feedback mechanisms: providing online feedback mechanisms, such as comment forms or email addresses, for users to provide feedback on accessibility issues. Additionally you may use features like SiteLint User Feedback Recordings that enhance the process of gathering and analyzing customer feedback through integrated video and audio recordings. This tool allows users to capture their screen and voice while interacting with a website, providing valuable insights into user experiences and issues.
By incorporating user feedback into the accessibility testing process, organizations can ensure that their products, websites, or applications are accessible and usable by people with disabilities.
Step 2: Prioritize issues
Issues are gathered through automated and manual testing. The largest number of reports come from automated tests. However, crawling scan reports generate the most and from all pages. This makes planning the remediation process more difficult and laborious due to the quantity. Can this be improved?
Crawling itself is necessary when we want to make an inventory. As long as the site or application allows crawling, because a Single Page Application is a barrier to crawling in this case.
A better way is to audit those places that are visited by the user. Then, instead of reports from all pages, even those that users have not visited, we will receive reports only from places that were visited by users. This means fewer reports and planning the remediation process based on the number of visits, reports and issues.
Once you get all reports, you should be able to sort them by WCAG Success Criteria and Level Conformance, then impact on the user, usually called severity.
In general, you may focus on fixing the most critical problems first, such as:
- Enabling keyboard navigation.
- Providing alternative text for images and multimedia.
- Ensuring sufficient color contrast between text and backgrounds.
- Ensure the content works with assistive technologies like a screen reader.
Step 3: Fix identified issues
Address the prioritized issues systematically. The WCAG compliance criteria are categorized into three levels:
- Level A: basic requirements that should be straightforward to implement.
- Level AA: the industry standard for legal compliance.
- Level AAA: advanced standards that enhance overall accessibility but may require more extensive changes.
Step 4: Verify fixes
After implementing fixes, it is crucial to verify their effectiveness:
- Ongoing monitoring: incorporate automated checks into your website’s maintenance routine.
- Periodic audits: schedule regular audits, especially after significant updates or redesigns.
- Staff training: educate your development, design and content teams on accessibility best practices to prevent future compliance issues.
Additional considerations for legacy content
Legacy websites often contain outdated content that may not meet current accessibility standards. Here are strategies specifically for addressing legacy content:
- Assessment and scoping: understand the volume of legacy content and prioritize based on impact and legal requirements.
- Semantic structuring: enhance document accessibility by adding semantic HTML tags and ensuring a logical hierarchy in content structure.
- User-centric testing: regularly test remediated documents with assistive technologies and involve users with disabilities in the feedback process.
Conclusion
Implementing an effective accessibility remediation strategy for legacy websites is essential for compliance and inclusivity. By following this structured approach – conducting audits, prioritizing fixes, systematically addressing issues, and verifying outcomes – organizations can significantly enhance their digital accessibility and create a welcoming environment for all users.
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