Starting our Journey to Digital Accessibility
Here at Dotdash, we create world-class content that is helpful, fast, and easy to consume. While we’re making progress toward this goal, one question needed to be asked: Are we helping everyone? An area we considered as part of the answer is our content’s accessibility. Can people with a wide range of impairments use and enjoy our content? Upon review, we found that while we weren’t totally inaccessible, there were obvious areas for improvement. This was a gap, and a challenge that we are eager to fill this year, and we plan to document our process throughout our journey.
As a product organization, our priority is understanding the needs of users — all users. This empathy drives us to understand how our content can better serve everyone. To do this, we started by digging in to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and learning the tools used to audit digital properties for non-compliance. As every part of our organization plays a role in creating and maintaining quality content for all, we must all be educated on web accessibility concepts, thus incorporating digital accessibility thinking into our daily operations.
Compassion
After attending SXSW in Austin to learn more about accessibility best practices, I presented this concept to our Dotdash teams during our own internal “SXSW at Dotdash” day, and announced that we would be adding accessibility as a bonus scoring element to our next Hackathon. We were all new to the concept, so having it as a “bonus” worked then, but only as a temporary mindset. Content accessibility shouldn’t be seen as a bonus or a charity, but should be seen as part of our culture and DNA.
Before enforcing accessibility rules on our sites, we needed to understand just how these assistance tools work. After teaching myself the very basic elements of using Apple’s Voiceover, I started using it to read our content. Talk about an overwhelming experience! It was hard to imagine that someone could use these tools everyday to consume content, but there are millions who do this everyday. After learning some pretty helpful shortcuts, I was able to navigate the sites and show other product managers and Dotdashers how our content “sounds” when using a screen reader. This comes in handy for understanding how our buttons, links, forms, and other elements outside standard text are presented.
Compliance
Researching compliance standards and reading legal documents aren’t always exciting if you aren’t a legal buff, but it is necessary. Thankfully, there are tools that will audit a website, direct testers to the WCAG non-compliant guidelines, and even suggest how to fix issues. We are regularly using Google Lighthouse and Accessibility Insights as our tools, and for a quick runthrough, we find that WAVE is a great resource.
Culture
As a company of constant innovation, we will continue to create new features and products for our growing audience. As we create these new features we must find ways to incorporate accessible principles. Beyond compliance, we must make sure accessibility is part of our culture. With today being Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), we will continue to bring awareness to all of our teams about the importance of accessibility, as well as how we each play a part in making our content enjoyable for all.
We are looking forward to this journey, and will share lessons and our progress as we continue to learn and create accessible products!
