Building Accessible Websites From Scratch Part Two for Agencies and Developers

In the 16th episode of the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast, hosts Natalie Garza and accessibility expert Natalie MacLees discuss the importance of integrating web accessibility from the very start of the development process for developers and agencies. They tackle common misconceptions held by developers, the necessity of educating clients, and the legal implications of inaccessible websites.

Natalie G: Hello everybody and welcome to the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast. My name is Natalie G. I’m the Mic MC here and with us today is…

Natalie M: Natalie M. Accessibility expert.

Natalie G: Yes, and in today’s podcast, we are going to do the part two to last week’s episode, where we talk about web accessibility when building websites from scratch. This one is geared towards developers and agencies, basically, anybody who is actually making the website.

Natalie M: Professionals who build websites.

Natalie G: Professionals who build websites. And so we’re gonna start off with why is it important to build a website to be accessible from scratch?

Natalie M: Yeah. So we touched on this a little bit last time, but I think it’s worth doing a quick review. Your favorite metaphor, Natalie, you can’t put the chocolate chips in the cookie after it’s baked. So the best way to end up with an accessible website is to build it to be accessible from the very beginning.

It is the most cost-effective option. If you try to come back and make an inaccessible website accessible later, it’s going to be very expensive, very time-consuming, and very difficult, and the end result won’t be as good. And accessible websites are important, of course, because that way, there are no barriers to customers or users to the website.

Everybody has equal access to all of the information and services. The user experience of an accessible website is better for everybody who uses the site. You get a little SEO boost. And you can avoid legal risks ’cause people do get sued for having websites that aren’t accessible. And you could look at increasing your audience and potentially your revenue by about 20% if you are inclusive and allow everybody to easily use your website.

Natalie G: Yeah, and that means everything on your website, like the checkouts, like the memberships, like the ability To give your website owner money.

Natalie M: Make donations to a nonprofit. Yep. All of it should be accessible.

Natalie G: Yeah, and there’s a lot of misconceptions that developers have when it comes to making accessible websites.

Natalie M: They do, they do. A lot of developers don’t, you know, we talked about in an earlier episode how there’s a real lack of accessibility training in any kind of web development training. If it’s there at all, it’s often just one unit that’s kind of tucked in, in the middle of the class, and it’s not taught holistically throughout the entire curriculum.

And because of that, developers often make a lot of assumptions and think, “Oh, it’s really difficult. It’s really time-consuming. It’s expensive. It will constrain what we can do. It will constrain the design. Can’t be fancy and beautiful.” They’ll think, “Oh, we aren’t gonna be able to build certain kinds of functionality.

And the website is not gonna be as modern or fun or as exciting if I have to make it accessible.” And so they’re reticent to kind of dive in and figure out how to make that all happen.