If you’ve been paying attention to Delib for any length of time, you might have noticed we talk about accessibility a fair bit. We’re passionate about it and we like to think we do it well. A lot of web content tends to be designed first and adapted for accessibility afterwards, but most of it doesn’t even bother (97% of all web content fails accessibility standards).
Rather than using this fix-it-in-post methodology, Delib builds accessibility into all its products. Here’s what that means.
Why is accessibility important?
We believe that our tools should not only be functionally usable by those with accessibility needs, but pleasant to use too. The assumption tends to be that accessibility is for people with physical disabilities (e.g. blindness), but it extends much further than that. Take, for example, my grandmother: she wears bifocals and uses the ‘large text’ display function on her iPad. Trying to read pale grey text on a white background would be next to impossible. Same goes for people who experience migraines, epilepsy, and so on. Web accessibility issues affect all of us at some point in our lives.
Delib’s tools are WCAG 2.1 AA compliant
WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. They’re in place to ensure that accessing information on the web works for all people, whatever their hardware, software, language, location, or ability. You can read more about the guidelines, or if you’re more of a visual learner, this video from the World Wide Web Consortium (WC3) is really handy.
What does that mean in practice?
In the context of Delib’s tools, it means we’ve put certain things in place within all of our software. This includes ‘surface-level’ accessibility, such as:
- Text size, colour and font are at a readable size and contrast level, and are not changeable by customers
- Sites are ‘zoomable’ up to 200% without the text spilling off the screen
It also means that sites are compatible with accessibility software, for users who need to:
- Navigate the website using just a keyboard
- Navigate the website using speech recognition software
- Listen to the website using a screen reader
And finally, all of our tools are fully responsive, which means they fit on different types of devices like mobiles and tablets. This is significant because those more likely to use these types of devices include the elderly and those from disadvantaged backgrounds.
The importance of platform vs. content
While we can build accessibility into our tools, we can’t guarantee that the site is accessible after it’s been populated with content by our customers. With that being said, we offer advice, training, resources and webinars to our clients on accessibility. We encourage them to do things like:
- Write in plain language that’s easy to read and understand – avoid dense language
- Assign alt text to all images
- Make sure all embedded videos are captioned
- Stay away from PDFs (which aren’t readable by assistive software) wherever possible
- Keep it short, keep it simple
By ensuring consultations are accessible to all respondents, organisations can expect deeper, more representative insights and higher response rates.
To find out more about Delib’s tools and how they can help your organisation, you can book a free demo and we’ll walk you through it.
