At Sitemorse a core tenet of our mission is to empower and provide accountability to those inside organisations who want to drive innovation, ensuring every digital touch point is continually optimised for search, compliance and the best visitor experience.

We’re proud that providing an automated way to measure and improve levels of accessibility is one of the ways we’re delivering that promise, not only supporting compliance but also ensuring a great visitor experience for everybody. Providing a level playing field for all to access web content and services is critical for the future.

The elephant in the room

But there’s a problem.

Since the early nineties Sitemorse has been providing data on the levels of accessibility compliance, firstly for the WCAG 1.0 Guidelines, then the 2.0 Guidelines and through four iterations of the Sitemorse platform.  We’ve talked to hundreds of businesses, government departments and other organisations across different sectors and countries. We’ve measured thousands of websites.

In that time, we’ve come to two uncomfortable conclusions about accessibility compliance:

1. Many websites fundamentally fail to be accessibility compliant, partly because the WCAG guidelines are complicated and difficult to implement.
2. Not many people in organisations or the wider digital industries acknowledge this or want to talk about it.

Time and time again our data shows a lack of website accessibility compliance:

• Across the Global Top 250 Retailers, not one site achieves WCAG 2.0. 
• An Audit of the top Global Life Sciences companies showed that under 5% of content meets WCAG 2.0 A standards. 
• December 16^th 2016 marked the deadline for airlines to comply with the US DOT Air Carriers Access Act, requiring every site to meet WCAG2.0.  When assessed in Q4 2016, 98% of the airline pages failed.
• In Q4 2016 the accessibility of UK Higher Education Institutions were tested, many claimed to meet WCAG 2.0, over 90% did not achieve standard.
• The RNIB, the UK standard bearer for accessibility, claim AA compliance for their website, yet their shop does not achieve required levels even after 9 months.

Why don’t more people acknowledge that there is an issue?

Given the scale of the problem, it’s surprising there is not more of an active debate about the best way forward. In our view, there are several reasons for this.

1. It’s a sensitive subject and sometimes an awkward conversation. Questioning whether the guidelines are too complex can imply that you don’t support efforts to make websites accessible or you’re trying to justify ignoring the guidelines.
2. It’s not easy to admit your website does not meet accessibility standards. Externally it’s bad PR and doesn’t look good for externally agency involved. Internally, it looks like the digital team are failing. The best way to avoid giving an impression of culpability is not to admit there’s an issue in the first place.
3. It’s just not regarded as a strategic priority because it is not seen as a commercial issue. Instead it is generally regarded as a slightly annoying compliance issue. It’s not actively on many team’s radar.
4. Most digital teams do not have the knowledge, resourcing, budget, in-house skills or tools to confidently tackle the issue. It’s easier to ignore it.

Where do we go from here?

How do we go about changing this situation? In our view, there are three things that need to happen. We need to:

• Start the conversation about accessibility within organisations and across the industry.
• Shift the emphasis away from compliance to user experience, from achieving compliance to moving towards it.
• Take a pragmatic view to achieve better levels of accessibility and related compliance.

Start the conversation

We’re not going to get anywhere until we acknowledge that there is a wider problem around accessibility compliance. There needs to be an honest conversation about the true level of digital accessibility organisations achieve and their related commitment. We also need to acknowledge that the 2.0 guidelines are complex and full compliance is difficult.

We believe there’s not enough open and honest debate about accessibility in the wider digital industry too. Suppliers, both in terms of CMS providers and digital agencies, need to take more responsibility to help their clients and make it easier for digital teams to deliver truly accessible websites.

For example, many digital agencies will claim they deliver you a AA compliant website. What they don’t tell you is that being compliant is based on the website content and your ongoing management practices. Even at the time of launch, because most organisations don’t perform any type of measurement or audit around accessibility, a website may not be compliant.

Shift the emphasis

Ideally an outcome of any wider debate on accessibility will be to shift the emphasis of the current view.

We need to shift from this being a low agenda item to a priority area.  We think that can only be achieved when accessibility moves beyond being regarded just as a compliance issue to one which is also about improving the user experience for visitors. 

An improved user experience can have a direct commercial impact. Customers return. Calls to actions are actioned. Brand advocacy increases.  When accessibility and related compliance is regarded as an important factor in improving user experience it can become more of a strategic priority.  The related value of achieving compliance – a standard to be proud of – can also change.

We also need to shift the emphasis from achieving compliance to moving towards compliance. If we can acknowledge that many organisations and their digital teams are not there yet, but want to be, then we can more readily consider what needs to be done.

Take a pragmatic view

The best way forward to achieving compliance is taking a more pragmatic approach. That means changing the mindset of the digital team and stakeholders, taking a more phased approach to achieving compliance and implementing an ongoing programme of management and user education. In our previous post , we detailed eight ways organisations can start to move forward in this way.

Let’s do this!

If there is collective acknowledgement that there is an issue, a commitment to moving forward, and a sense of purpose, who knows what we can achieve?

Make your site a contribution to the goal of creating a fully accessible web. Let’s not let the inertia around the issue stop us having a compliant web. We should recognise that we have a general problem with website accessibility compliance and start the conversation today. Then we can deliver better websites tomorrow.