Accessibility isn't a simple button press to solve

We were recently on a popular skincare website and saw a button featured on the page: ‘Enable Accessibility’... If only it was that simple.

We’re seeing a lot of public sector and third sector websites too, that have these actions to take to ‘turn on’ a more accessible website, but the point of accessibility is to make a website more accessible to all - by default.

There are too many stopgaps, widgets and plugins we’re coming across that seem to be the answer to making a website more accessible. When in reality, designing and developing your website to be accessible in the first place or by continually striving to improve it are the only ways to truly make a difference.

There isn’t a one-stop solution for making a website accessible unfortunately.

They can’t do everything

A plugin doesn’t make your website faster, change your core brand colours from being compliant, or how someone reliant on a keyboard traverses your website, and in fact it’s probably hindering them.

It does however change the markup (the code) of your website, something you may have worked very hard on, and it can change it for the worse:

...I know with 100% certainty, any site which has deployed an overlay in the past year and a half has been less useable for both my wife and me—both blind.

That’s from a case study about overlays – plugins that effectively change your website to attempt to make it more usable, they offer plenty of options and it all seems very cool, but not for people who actually need assistance. There’s plenty more comments where that came from here.

Plugins talk a lot about lawsuits and being ahead of the curve on accessibility - there is something to be said for that, and having a plugin is better than nothing; but more needs to be done to realise this isn’t the full solution and should only be something to help bridge the gap whilst you improve your website.

Userway and accessiBE are popular plugins to improve accessibility, but in the words of Userway: the widget “remediates” accessibility issues, but that's only a small portion of them (20%) related to design and the user interface; and even after installing the widget, your website still won’t be WCAG compliant.

I would highly suggest if you’d like to see the experience users can have with plugins such as these that you watch the video below; it’s a blind man trying to use an ‘accessibility plugin’ to traverse a vehicle sales website and it makes for an absolutely awful experience.

One does not simply ‘Enable Accessibility’