Posted on December 1, 2020March 26, 2021How to fix the 5 most common Accessibility errors by Jay Pope
We recently reanalyzed a sample of up to 100 pages from every college and university in the United States with our Higher Ed in 4k project. Similarly WebAIM analyzed the top million most popular home pages with their WebAIM Million project. Between the projects we have learned lots of interesting information about the state of web accessibility.
My biggest takeaway is that by fixing 5 basic accessibility issues we could fix over 90% of all errors detected. Both projects found the same 5 errors to be the most common; Low color contrast, Missing alternative text, Empty links, Missing form labels and Empty buttons.
While it is important to understand that websites have more accessibility issues than can be automatically detected, these detectable errors are very impactful for many users with disabilities and tend to be related to non-detectable errors. Fixing them would make the internet significantly more accessible. In most cases they are also relatively simple to fix.
Learning 5 principles and applying them can be an approachable starting point to improve your organization’s web accessibility.
I semi-randomly selected an example from a college/university website in [...]