engaging a wider audience via accessibility because everybody just wants to have fun

It is important for everyone to be able to access websites. And so our government and industries are busy working together to determine the best way to update the ADA guidelines. So while we wait (and wait and wait) for legislation to be enacted, three levels of standard recommendations have been established. These are defined by the creators of the Web themselves — the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) — through the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). These are known as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it?

Beach Blanket Babylon wanted everyone to enjoy their world famous shows, so it stands to reason that they also wanted the same level of access for their site and we were happy to help them attain that goal. The three levels of accessibility defined by WCAG  are A, AA, and AAA, with “A” being the most basic, and “AAA” being the most comprehensive. With this project, we were going for level “AA.” This provides a nice balance of functionality and design.

Web accessibility revolves around four key concepts:

• Perceivable information and user interface

• Operable user interface and navigation

• Understandable information and user interface

• Robust content and reliable interpretation

Below, you can see an example of keyboard navigation. We are avoiding what is called a “keyboard trap” The grey boxes jump from item to item without clicking on a mouse, but instead allowing users to navigate using the tab key. Ensuring that the navigation follows a clear pattern without too many clicks allows users to access content with assistive technology.

As you can probably see, these concepts benefit all users  — not just those with obvious disabilities but also those of us (like our CXO) who just could use a little accommodation. The goal of every site that 300FeetOut builds is to accomplish clarity and simplicity, whether we’re specifically building with disabilities in mind or not. And accessibility doesn’t just stop once something is built, because the web changes. So we encourage our clients to run checks on a monthly basis and continually refine and improve content to make sure it passes inspection. 

This included things as simple as:

• Text contrast

• Keyboard navigation

• Link text

• Page titles

• Menu text

• Image “alt” tags (describing images)

On top of that, we also completely rebuilt and augmented  the code with Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) tags — pieces of code that provide additional information to screen readers, allowing them to get information about the priority and meaning of content on the page.

As with all things, accessibility is constantly evolving — there continue to be better ways to provide successful interactions, and we continue to strive for the best possible experience for all users.