How to make your website mobile accessible
It’s not rocket science. You can already get good results and break barriers with just a few basics.
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There are 1.1 billion people with disabilities living on the planet. Before the lecture “Accessibility & Multi Screen Design” by Eric Eggert in my master’s program Content Strategy at the FH JOANNEUM I had no idea about this number. And: Accessibility of the web matters to all of us. Disabilities are as diverse as humans and range from blindness, low vision, learning disabilities to (temporal) physical disabilities after an accident. Every one of us may be affected by such a disability in his or her live — and we still want to be able to access the web as usual, don’t we?
For me as a journalist the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) further highlighted the importance of accessibility issues. Article 29 is about Participation in political and public life. It says that
“States Parties shall guarantee to persons with disabilities political rights and the opportunity to enjoy them on an equal basis with other”.
People must have access to information in order to be able to participate in political and public life. Journalists and news outlets have a clear and important responsibility here. We have to make our articles accessible to everyone.
Why mobile accessibility matters
Making the desktop version of your website accessible is fine and important — but not enough. We can’t carry our desktop screen in our pocket, do we? The journey leads to mobile paths: Already in 2015, the number of mobile-only internet users exceeded desktop-only in the U.S. as a study by comscore shows.
I recently viewed an interesting talk by Marcy Sutton about “How to Win at Mobile Accessibility”. Sutton is a Lead Software Engineer on the Developer Relations team at Gatsby, a remote startup creating accessible websites and webapps. Previously, she worked as a…
