A couple weeks ago, my daytime employer published an accessibility statement to its website. This has been a long time coming, I have been in discussion with company leadership for two and a half years about the purpose, benefits, and legal ramifications associated with an accessibility statement. The statement has room for improvement, but it’s finally live and I am feeling pretty encouraged right now.
In light of this milestone, I would like to write about why your website should also have an accessibility statement.
What is an accessibility statement
An accessibility statement is a document that communicates your organization’s commitment and efforts to make its website, apps, software, and/or other digital assets accessible to users with disabilities. It’s important to understand that an accessibility statement is not so much a guarantee that a website is accessible as it is a public commitment to digital accessibility. Accessibility is an ongoing process. With constant changes in technology and legislation, and each user having distinct needs, the most any organization can really guarantee is that its product was completely accessible at a single point in time and under a well-defined set of circumstances. And even that is very hard to do.
Instead, a good accessibility statement should convey your efforts and intent towards an inclusive digital experience. Gen Herres from Easy A11y Guide recently published a video on how to test a website for an accessibility statement. In it, she outlines the primary information that needs to be in this document. The following list of accessibility statement components is inspired by Gen’s list.
Commitment to digital accessibility
First, articulate the particular accessibility standard your website strives to meet. For instance, many accessibility statements reference the most recent version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.2 at the time of this writing) level AA as their standard, as it has been successfully argued in many lawsuits to be a good benchmark of an accessible website. Another example is Section 508, which all digital properties managed by United States government agencies are required to comply with.
Communicate your accessibility efforts
Provide a list of specific steps your organization has taken to make its digital resources accessible. This can include items like the following.
- Digital accessibility best practices your site employs such as support for keyboard navigation, accessible forms, and semantic HTML.
- Specific standard requirements that are of particular importance to your visitors. For instance, if you run a stock photography website, you may want to explicitly call out that all images have alternative descriptions in accordance with the WCAG 2.2 1.1.1 Non-text Content success criterion.
- Partnerships with third-party vendors or experts you are engaging with to test and treat your website for accessibility issues.
You should also describe any known accessibility limitations and inaccessible content on your site along with what steps are being taken to improve these shortcomings. In a recent episode of the Accessibility Craft podcast, Equalize Digital CEO Amber Hinds details her efforts to create an accessible WooCommerce site to sell merchandise themed for the podcast. The accessibility statement for this site includes a Work in Progress section which lists accessibility issues with third-party software along with links to Github issues she created for these problems.
Contact information
Let visitors know how they can report an accessibility issue on your site or ask for help. At minimum, you should give an email address visitors can use to contact you. Include a customer service phone number if you have one, and provide links to contact or feedback forms on your website..
Modification clause and last updated date
Since digital accessibility is a journey, you should expect that your website’s accessibility statement will change over time. Here are some circumstances when you may need to update your accessibility statement.
- Your website receives accessibility enhancements.
- New digital accessibility legislation is passed.
- Assistive technology offerings or capabilities change.
Your accessibility statement should let visitors know that it may be updated from time to time. Your statement should also state the date of its most recent modification.
Why you need an accessibility statement
Now that you know the purpose and essential contents of an accessibility statement, we can explore why it’s necessary to create one for your website.
Legal protection
As far as I know, the major accessibility standards do not include a requirement for an accessibility statement. However, there are still two good legal reasons for putting one on your site.
- It gives visitors who encounter accessibility issues on your website an option to report them directly to you before taking legal action.
- One common requirement of settlements and rulings for accessibility lawsuits is to add an accessibility statement or policy to the offending website. Publishing a statement proactively may help your case should your organization ever be sued for an accessibility violation.
(Thanks to Gen Herres for these insights in her recent video listed above.)
Boost in your brand reputation
More than just a means to mitigate litigation, an accessibility statement is an opportunity to market your organization as being inclusive. It provides a means to engage directly with visitors to your site with disabilities. It indicates that you are prioritizing and practicing digital accessibility. This can strengthen your organization’s reputation and widen your audience.
Continuous accessibility enhancement
An accessibility statement reminds you of your commitment to an inclusive web experience. It will help keep accessibility top-of-mind as your website evolves. As you develop new features and integrate third-party solutions, your accessibility statement will give you an extra prompt to incorporate accessibility into your design, implementation, and testing processes. It’s a great self-accountability tool.
Posting your accessibility statement to your website
Once you have written your accessibility statement, here are some guidelines for publishing and promoting it.
- Create a dedicated page for your accessibility statement, just like the ones you may have for your privacy policy, terms and conditions, and cookie notice.
- Place a link to your accessibility statement on every page of your website. Your footer is often a good location for this. The link can be named “Accessibility Statement” or just “Accessibility” depending on how much room you have. Many sites position this link next to their privacy page link.
- Alternatively, if your website has a central page with links to all your organization’s policies, you might add a link to your accessibility statement to that policy page.
- Make sure your accessibility statement can be crawled and indexed by search engines. Do not include a
nofollowattribute in links to it, and don’t disallow it in your site’srobots.txtfile.
Example accessibility statements
Finally, here are some examples of accessibility statements from around the web.
- L.L. Bean: a succinct articulation of the company’s commitment to web accessibility
- The Internal Revenue Service (IRS): In addition to the basics, this statement provides links to other accessibility resources from the agency.
- Pedal Point Solutions: Our statement contains several short sections covering the information listed in this article.
Do you need an accessibility statement? Pedal Point can help. Contact us to discuss how we can work together to create a great statement for your website.