How to Make Web Accessibility “Easy”

With ADA Title II deadlines, you just spent a ton of time and money on a huge website accessibility remediation. Now that some time has passed, your team has posted a ton of new content, blogs, videos, even updated landing pages, and your website is out of compliance again. It feels like all of that work was for nothing.

It doesn’t have to be. Web accessibility is not a one-and-done project that IT needs to manage. True digital accessibility starts before you write a single line of a blog, upload that image, or create that landing page. You just have to learn how to improve your web accessibility and content.

Want to keep your website compliant? Web accessibility is a process. It’s not about fixing code in your website; it’s changing your mindset and how you create regular content. When you build web accessibility into your normal content process, you protect your clients, reach a wider audience, and save a ton of money and time by avoiding mistakes.

In this article, we are going to explore how you can improve your web accessibility from the beginning, the steps to creating a new process for you and your team, and some quick wins you can start today.

Over the last few months, several organizations and higher education institutions have been panicking about the new ADA guidelines. Even though the deadline for Title II Part H was pushed back to 2027, that still doesn’t leave much time to fix large websites. (It took over a year to get NUHS mostly compliant.)

What’s generally happening in these cases is that too many institutions are relying on either IT staff (who are NOT website experts), their one web developer, or automated accessibility tools to tell them if they’re compliant. Why is that a problem? Because in most of these cases, these are not the only people posting content to the website. It’s all too common for someone posting a blog or news update to forget an ALT description or use incorrect heading sizes, and now we have accessibility issues.

And these issues spiral out of control when no one is in charge of ensuring things are done correctly.

Most web accessibility violations happen after a website is launched, and those are typically caused by the regular content your marketing team is uploading to the website. Color combinations, forms, videos, and even PDFs are knocking your website out of compliance. And you just spent months getting things fixed.

When we rely too heavily on one person to ensure our website is accessible while still giving untrained team members editing access, it’s a recipe for disaster.

Want to know how to instantly start improving your web accessibility? Start planning for a true process. Consider who has access to the website and who is in charge of graphics or other website assets. Then, think through the accessibility items they can and should be addressing.

For instance:

• Designers: Choose color combinations, heading sizes, and design hierarchies.
• Writers: Choose link text and control whether or not text is at a readable level.
• Social/Content Managers: Add ALT text, video captions, and carry through correct formatting.

Think about who on your team contributes to the website or even your digital content. Write out their role and what they add. Then, save that as we move into creating an accessibility process.

Web accessibility should not be happening after content is live on your website. It has to start at the beginning of any project.

Do you regularly post blog and news updates? Make sure your writer is formatting those correctly. Does your social media and content team regularly add images throughout your marketing? Ensure they’re adding clear ALT text to every non-decorative graphic.

When you want to create accessible content, you need a process in place to ensure no one misses a vital step. This process should reflect how your team currently handles regular content, but with some accessibility checks and steps added.

Let’s break down a couple of examples.

If you regularly add blogs and news articles to your website, you need to start accessibility from the beginning.

Your process could look like:

• Creation: Writing at a lower reading level, with structured headers, and including clear link text. You can also plan for captions for infographics and, if you select images, ALT text that demonstrates the purpose and context of the image.
• Review: An editor or team member can double-check your writer has followed basic best practices and isn’t missing any items.
• Publishing: Content is uploaded into the CMS while selecting the correct content tags, adding ALT text and links, and even having external links open in new tabs.

Your design team also needs to follow some web accessibility basics before they start working in Adobe or Canva.

An accessible graphics process can look like:

• Creation: Checking appropriate contrast of all color combinations, avoiding all-caps text, and following normal brand guidelines.
• Review: An editor or team member can have a checklist that they review the graphics with.
• Publishing: The graphic is provided to the content manager, who adds the ALT text (usually the text within the graphic, if applicable), and uploads.

So what happens in both of these examples if web accessibility checks happened at the very end?

Let’s take our writing example. If accessibility isn’t checked until after content is published or just before, the editor can find multiple mistakes that have to be corrected. Worst-case scenario, the entire article is too difficult to read and has to be restructured to be accessible. That’s a lot of work and wastes time.

With the graphics example, if the color contrasts are not readable, the designer has to go back and start from scratch.

All too often, I’ve had clients who want us to check accessibility during the development process. By then, they’ve already created content and designs and had sign-off on both. We inevitably find accessibility issues throughout both, which means the design and content have to be adjusted after approval.

Imagine explaining to the stakeholders that what you showed them before won’t work and you have to fix things they’d already approved. That wastes everyone’s time and money, and causes a ton of frustration.

Want to know what kinds of checks should be in your web accessibility process? Let’s review some quick things you can start working on now to improve your web accessibility.

A big mistake a lot of people make is using super simple alternative text descriptions, i.e., “red Ford truck.” This might work if the picture is exactly that, but WCAG states you need to provide the context and purpose of the image, too. You also do not need to include “image of” or “graphic of” as the screen-reading tool will explain that. Keep this description under 125 characters.

A great example is using a picture of students looking happy on campus (see below) on a page talking about campus life. Your ALT text can be: “Multiple students smiling and grouped together to take a selfie on campus.”

If I could wave a magic wand and make these all go away, I absolutely would. When you link to PDFs, other pages in your website, or external assets, the text you link matters. Someone using a screen reader can jump from link to link only, meaning they don’t hear all the content around that link. When the link text is just “click here” or “learn more,” they have no idea what they’re clicking on.

Instead, you want that link text to be descriptive of where they’re going to go. For example, in this article I could talk about the many reasons PDFs are inherently inaccessible, but link to my article about how to make accessible PDFs. Notice the text I linked? When someone hears or sees that, they know exactly what they’ll find if they click the link.

Not all of your brand colors work together, and you might be shocked to discover which ones don’t actually work. Before you design graphics or new pages, check your color combinations in a free tool like WebAim’s Contrast Checker.

All you have to do is add the two hexcodes you’d like to use. If they get over a 4.5:1 ratio, you’re safe to use them as a font and background color. If not, mark that down as not a safe combination and keep testing for ones that pass.

If you are uploading a video to your website with any kind of narration, you need to provide closed captions. YouTube, Vimeo, and most other video hosting platforms now have automated captioning tools. While these may not be 100% accessible, they are better than having no captions at all.

True closed captions should cover more than just speech and note when music starts, sound effects happen, or speakers switch. (Netflix has become a bit of a meme with their slightly…enthusiastic closed captions, especially for Stranger Things.)

If you do not have the resources to create actual SRT files, you can use the auto-captioning tools. Just make sure to double-check for accuracy.

I know that most people find web accessibility overwhelming. There are a ton of WCAG standards to follow, and those success criteria can feel overwhelming. But your team does not have to be full of WCAG experts to create accessible content. They just need to understand the fundamentals.

One of the things that has frustrated me during my 13+ years in accessibility? Most training and content is geared toward coders and made to seem nearly impossible to understand. How are we going to improve more than 4% of the internet if we gatekeep it all?

Short answer: we won’t. That’s why Captain Coder is addressing the accessibility gap with marketers.

Improving your web accessibility and creating a process does not have to be overwhelming. In fact, you can bake this all into your normal workflow pretty easily without drowning in WCAG standards.

Captain Coder is launching Creating Accessible Content soon. This simple, approachable course will take you through our normal content-creation process. You’ll not only get the exact steps you need to follow, but why we follow them. Believe me, when you understand who you’re helping and how, accessibility becomes a whole lot easier.

This course isn’t for coders, not really. It’s for marketers, content creators, designers, writers, and anyone who wants to create accessible content and master those daily habits. This is the exact blueprint your team needs to stop breaking the web accessibility remediation you just paid thousands of dollars for.

Want to be the first to know when it launches? Join the Creating Accessible Content waitlist now. As a bonus, you’ll get instant access to our Image Optimization Cheat Sheet so you can start improving your web accessibility now.

Get ready to have a full process for your regular, accessible content.