Clients breaking accessibility
Accessibility is part of website development that can be left unattended and unnoticed. Accessibility is about allowing all users to be able to use your website no matter what disability they have. There are many facets of accessibility and if any one of these parts is broken, it can inhibit users from accessing your parts of your pages. Clients rarely understand how to ensure their pages are accessible and most do not care.
What can happen with our websites is that we include fantastic alt text. We provide semantic HTML 5 markup, include skip links and other techniques to provide accessibility for our users.
The problem is once we hand over our website to our client, everything seems to break down. Clients may add an image to a page and not provide any alt text. The client may insert a table and not use the summary attribute or provide scoping rules for the columns. There are many aspects of web development in which a client does not understand and breaks what we have previously created.
Therefore we have three options. The first is to just leave clients as they are. We have done our job and made the website accessible and if the client breaks that, then it is not our concern, we cannot continually monitor every website we create. This seems to be the most common course of action.
The second option we have is to train our clients. We can point them in the right direction to articles explaining accessibility and the importance of it. We could sit down and have training sessions with our clients and ensure they understand what is needed to update their website. But is this really practical? Do we really have time to do all this? The answer is usually no.
The final option and the most viable option is to create and use better tools to get the job done. Our rich text editors should ensure alt text is present with images and give the user information about why it's important. We could make the summary attribute in tables mandatory. We could change the options so our clients are forced to use it the way we want. The problem with this approach is that it is intrusive. Clients just want to add an image to a page, they just want to add some text to a page and move on. Clients are very busy with their job and don't want to spend too much time on websites and if our tools have too many rules, they won't want to use them and become frustrated.
In the end maybe it's best that we update the websites and tell our clients to just send the text and images they would like to be added.
