Building Accessibility Into Every Website We Create

There’s a lot that goes into building a good website that you’ll never actually see.

Every Eldo website is individually designed and developed, but behind the scenes they all benefit from the same carefully developed framework and the standards we build into it. Accessibility is an important part of that.

From keyboard navigation and screen readers to focus states, semantic code and properly structured content, there’s a surprising amount happening underneath a website to make it easier for as many people as possible to use. Much of it will never be noticed by the average visitor, but that doesn’t make it any less important.

What is website accessibility?

Website accessibility is about making sure websites can be used by as many people as possible, including people with visual, hearing, motor or cognitive impairments and those who use assistive technologies such as screen readers.

It also means thinking beyond the traditional mouse or touchscreen. Someone should, for example, be able to navigate and interact with a website using a keyboard without getting lost or being unable to access important content. While accessibility is particularly important for people with disabilities, many of the principles behind it simply result in a better website for everyone.

A lot of the recognised guidance around this comes from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, usually referred to as WCAG. These provide internationally recognised guidance on making web content more accessible and cover areas such as keyboard use, colour contrast, page structure, labels and the behaviour of interactive elements.

It starts with the foundations

At Eldo, we build bespoke WordPress websites, but we don’t start every project with a completely empty folder. We’ve developed our own framework containing the core components, functionality and foundations we use when creating a new website. It gives us a solid, tried-and-tested starting point while still allowing every website we produce to be individually designed and developed for the client.

Accessibility is built into those foundations. Rather than treating it as an optional extra or something to bolt on at the end of a project, many of the fundamentals are already considered in the way our framework and its components are built, with WCAG principles helping inform how we approach accessibility throughout.

As we develop new websites, test different approaches and evolve the framework, those foundations continue to be refined too.

What does that mean in practice?

There are lots of different ways somebody might interact with a website, so we need to think beyond simply how it looks and behaves with a mouse.

Our framework considers areas including keyboard navigation, visible focus states, menus and interactive elements, buttons and links, forms and form controls, semantic HTML, heading structures, labels, images and alternative text, colour contrast, motion and animation, mobile navigation and screen reader behaviour.

It’s also about the smaller details that can easily go unnoticed. Can you see where you are when tabbing through a page? Does an interactive element make sense without relying purely on its appearance? Can a menu be opened, navigated and closed without a mouse? Is content structured in a way that assistive technology can understand?

Individually, some of these things are tiny. Together, they can make a considerable difference.

Better accessibility without compromising design

Accessibility doesn’t mean stripping away good design or producing boring websites. A button can still look great, a menu can still be interesting and animation can still add personality to a page.

The important part is making sure those things are built thoughtfully and don’t unnecessarily prevent somebody from using the website in a different way. For most visitors, much of this work will be completely invisible. For somebody who needs it, it can be very important.

Part of how we build

Every Eldo website is different. Designs, colours, content, third-party functionality and client requirements all vary, so accessibility still needs to be considered throughout each individual project.

While our framework incorporates many of the principles and best practices set out in WCAG, every finished website is different. Its design, content and third-party functionality all play a part in accessibility, so we wouldn’t claim that the framework alone automatically makes every website fully WCAG compliant.

What it does mean is that accessibility is considered from the foundations upwards, alongside performance, responsive design, SEO, usability and all the other things that go into producing a good website.

And because our framework continues to evolve, improvements and lessons from the websites we build can feed back into the foundations we use for the next one.

Always evolving

The web never stands still. Standards and technology evolve, browsers change, new functionality becomes possible, and the websites we build become more sophisticated.

Our framework evolves with it.

Accessibility is part of that ongoing development and part of our wider aim to build websites properly, not just websites that look good, but ones that are fast, usable, well structured and thoughtfully built underneath too.

A lot of that is work most people will never see. But we think it’s every bit as important as the bits they do.