Accessibility Remediation Best Practices: Tips and Tricks

by Emma Jones Get digital accessibility services

Accessibility remediation refers to bringing your digital assets into compliance with recognized standards of accessibility with the goal of providing a better user experience for people with special needs. This includes making it compliant with Section 508 remediation, which is one of the digital accessibility services.

Making your digital content accessible remediation is important because it provides fair access to everyone, regardless of their abilities. It involves the optimization of code, design, and features of an application or website so anyone can comfortably use it. In this blog post, we will discuss some tips and tricks to attain 508 remediation services.

508 remediation services involve creating an environment that is accessible to people with disabilities, as well as those without. This includes designing digital content with features such as keyboard navigation, visual cues, and audio cues that enable people with disabilities to access digital content. Additionally, 508 remediation services should ensure that the digital content is optimized for screen readers and other assistive technologies that can help people with disabilities access digital content.

How to Understand Accessibility?

Accessibility is the practice of making information, images, videos, and activities meaningful and usable for as many people as possible. There are various methods to ensure accessibility, including some automated and manual testing.

The website accessibility standards include four main principles. Based on these four principles, web accessibility standards are defined.

Perceivable: Visitors can easily perceive or understand the content and information presented on your website. The definition of perceiving is not limited to “seeing with one’s eyes.” Still, it should also be able to be perceived by people who are blind or people who have low vision, or the ones who use screen readers or any other assistive technology.

Operable: It means that every part of your site’s functionality can be utilized by everyone, such as from navigating a page to selecting any link from the menu and also being able to play and pause video content.

Understandable: The website content on your website shall be written in a way that the visitors easily understand. Using jumbled language can make it difficult for visitors to interpret the meaning. It also limits access to those with cognitive difficulties or impairments and people who do not speak your site’s language.

Robust: The website content should be easily interpreted and consumable by all the visitors and can easily adapt technologies like screen readers.

When following the standards of accessibility, you can take the help of full-time 508 compliance services from any reputed organization.

How to Conduct an Accessibility Audit?

To conduct an accessibility audit, you can follow the below steps:

Step 1: Review the latest guidelines of WCAG 2.0
Step 2: Create a review checklist to ensure you don’t miss anything.
Step 3: Run your site through the W3C Markup Validation Tool.
Step 4: Conduct screen reader compatibility testing
Step 5: Check your content’s color contrast.
Step 6: Verify that Keyboard-only navigation works.

Following the above points allows you to analyze all the barriers that could exist on your website. By the end of implementing the remediation procedures for the barriers, your site will be free from all the issues.

Some of the Accessibility Remediation Best Practices

Accessibility remediation has types based on where you are using it. In this section, we will discuss some types of accessibility remediation best practices.

Website Accessibility Best Practices

The best practices under Section 508 remediation services for website accessibility include the following points:

Keyboard Navigation: This allows the user to easily navigate by using only a keyboard.

Alternative texts for images: This allows the users to understand the image concept if they are visually impaired or when the image is unable to load.

Color Contrast: It ensures that users with visual impairments can easily grab the content by following a particular ratio of color contrast.

Captions and transcripts for multimedia: With the help of captions and transcripts, people who are deaf or hard of hearing can access the multimedia content.

Proper Heading Structure: Proper formatting of the website content makes it easy for people to differentiate between the headings and contents underlined within it.

Document Accessibility Best Practices

The best practices to ensure that the document is accessible include:

Using Proper Heading: This helps in structuring the content in a good manner to be understood at a glance.

Adding Alt Text for Images and Tables: By doing this, you are making images and tables accessible to the ones who are visually impaired.

Proper Use of Lists: Proper lists ensure the content format is well aligned.

Accessible Tables and Charts: By making these accessible, you ensure that every kind of audience can catch the data information.

Appropriate Color Usage: This allows people with visual impairments to easily be able to go through with the digital content.

Software Accessibility Best Practices

To make your software accessible, some of the best practices to implement include:

Keyboard Accessibility: By doing this, the software can be used by people with disabilities.

Using Accessible Dialogs and Alerts: This allows people with vision impairments to listen and understand the use of options available in a software or application.

Providing Feedback to Users: This helps to enhance usability by seeing the customer’s feedback.

Compatible with Assistive Technology: Making sure that your software can work appropriately by using any assistive technology ensure people with disabilities to use your software efficiently.

Proper Use of Focus and Tab Order: Using proper focus and tab order allows the user to navigate through the software or application easily.

How to Implement Accessibility Testing and Validation?

Implementing accessibility testing and validation includes the types of testing that can be used to fix different types of barriers, identification and remediation. Some of the testing methods include:

Implementing accessibility testing and validation includes the types of testing that can be used to fix different types of barriers, identification, and remediation. Some of the testing methods include:

Automated Testing: Includes using several tools and techniques to find the barriers.

Manual Testing: This includes the experts of the domain manually analyzing the website to find the issues.

Functional Testing: This checks how well the website or software works or if it is easy to navigate and use.

Usability Testing: This includes people with disabilities using the website or software to see if they face any difficulties while using the same.

The above testing allows us to identify the barriers to accessibility, and remediation can be done as per Section 508 Remediation Compliance. Once you fix the barriers, you can always validate it by re-doing the testing to ensure it is now accessible.

Wrapping Up

In this blog, we discussed the best practices for accessibility remediation. Accessibility remediation is one of the processes to ensure accessibility under digital accessibility services. With the help of 508 remediation services, you ensure your website, software, application, or any other digital content is accessible to every kind of user, regardless of their abilities.