Having an accessibility statement on the website shows your commitment towards persons with disabilities. With the increase in awareness on the need of inclusive digital content, either you have a website or a mobile app, showing your commitment towards accessibility is important.
While having relevant information on an accessibility statement acknowledges the commitment towards accessibility and improve the brand image of your business, providing irrelevant or false information may damage the reputation.
Is it important to have an accessibility statement?
While showing your commitment towards accessibility and persons with disabilities, accessibility statement provides you an opportunity to speak about the effort you have put in for the commitment. In addition you can briefly talk about the accessibility enhancements, accessibility standards followed and the supported assistive technologies, browsers and operating systems. The accessibility statement will also give you an opportunity to be open on any inaccessible content and can share your justification or alternate methods to use such content. This statement also opens up the door for the users to share feedback which of course is the best input you can ever get.
What’s include in the accessibility statement?
The Education and Outreach group of world Wide Web Consortium WAI developed an interesting accessibility statement generation tool. According to this the following can be included as part of your accessibility statement
- Basic information: A brief information about your business, accessibility standards applied and contact information for feedback.
- Your efforts: In this section you can explain the efforts you have taken and will be taking in the future to make the website accessible. Further you can also explain the long term goals you have for the website or mobile app accessibility.
- Technical information: This section can explain about the technology used such as HTML, CSS JavaScript etc and how you used them to make your application accessible. This will also give you an opportunity to talk about the compatible assistive technologies, browsers and operating systems and any known compatibility issues. You may also document the evidence for your accessibility claims such as link to an accessibility report, external quality check information, certifications if any.
- –Approval and complaints process: I believe it might not be possible in many situations but It will be worth mentioning the team within the organization that approved this statement. In addition if the organization have any complaint hierarchy for accessibility, this is the place to provide it.
Writing the accessibility statement
Writing the accessibility statement is often same as writing any other content of the page, however the Education and Outreach group of W3C have developed a wonderful tool to generate the same. All that you need to do is to provide as much information as you could on the tool and create the accessibility statement. Download the HTML file after the preview and update your website.
Have a look at the Accessibility statement generating tool and update your website today.
Sample accessibility statements
Here are few sample statements generated from the tool.