Challenge
In 2023, tretton37 launched a new website. During this time, the priority was launching version 1 of a site that better supported our business growth, and accessibility fell by the wayside. It isn’t that we didn’t care about accessibility, we just trusted the people who built our page to deliver quality and we relied on automated testing tools as a catch-all solution. It turns out, this wasn’t the best way to go.
With the upcoming European Accessibility Act (EAA) coming into effect in 2025, we decided to ensure that our site is as accessible as possible. Truth be told, we don’t have to be compliant because we don’t fall under the industries that do, but we choose to be compliant because we find it important.
Additionally, the timing was right because we just launched a new accessibility review service to help clients become more accessible. Naturally, we decided to start with our own website - not only to practice our skills but to make sure we’re keeping our house in order.
In our accessibility review service, we use a combination of automated and manual testing tools to identify as many potential issues as possible. Note that automated testing tools are limited and can only catch some issues. They also tend to flag both false positives and negatives, so it is best to combine different testing methods to reduce errors. We then provide a list of the potential issues we’ve identified, prioritised by the amount of people they affect and how negatively they impact the experience.
Solution
We began our internal accessibility review by looking at the analytics to find out the most visited pages. We then discussed our findings with our internal stakeholders and got the green light to evaluate the accessibility of a single route, in this case, we chose the route of the job seeker. Note that we are defining a route as the part of the user journey that takes place inside the application, and the user journey is broader as it extends beyond the application itself.
Looking at a single route is far from perfect, and of course, we can miss some things. However, we know it is the first step in making our website better and more accessible since, as a consultancy, a core part of our business is recruiting talent.
Process
We started by looking through each of the screens in the “job seeker” route and tried to apply for our “open application”. Our evaluation ends where another solution (Teamtailor) starts. BTW - kudos to Teamtailor for the excellent work they did on making their service accessible.
We tested 4 pages using 4 different types of tests. We video-recorded our findings to make it easier to recreate and further explain what the issues are. We then sent the recordings and our prioritised list of findings.
Findings
Let’s start with the bad news: we discovered that we are not fully compliant with WCAG 2.1. WCAG 2.1 stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1, which outlines the international standards for making web content more accessible. This is what a lot of the EAA law is based upon.
Like yourself, we are still on our accessibility journey, but we are learning and improving every day. Most of the problems we discovered were structural problems and not ones that relate “only” to making our page accessible. For example:
- We can improve by focusing on well-structured, semantically correct HTML. This means creating code that is organised, clear, and uses appropriate elements to represent the content and structure of a webpage in a meaningful way.
- We also found some pages with multiple H1s (heading 1) or headings that are out of order. This can be confusing for those navigating our website with only a keyboard or voice command.
- A few of our images are missing their alternative text (alt text) which is important for readers who have trouble viewing images.
With every improvement, we are not only making our website more compliant with the EAA, but we are also boosting our SEO, and keeping our code easy to work with and well documented (aka, two birds with one stone, or two mosquitoes with one clap).
Most of the things we uncovered are relatively simple, cheap, and easy to fix. It seems accessibility is easier than you think.
Outcome
We uncovered several challenges with our current webpage and now have a roadmap of fixes and improvements. We learned a lot about what we take for granted and learned that even if you think you’re doing well, you can always improve. Being accessible requires ongoing effort and commitment to accessibility best practices. Websites should undergo regular audits and testing to identify and address accessibility issues to ensure equal access to information and services for all users.
We don’t believe accessibility is a pain. It is simply part of building things right, and definitely something you need to look into.
Reach out if you have any questions or if you want to hear more about how we make things accessible at tretton37 and our clients.
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