Web Accessibility: Fulfilling Tim Berners-Lee's Dream of a Better Web

To speak of web accessibility is to speak of the universality of communication and information, since it gives everyone the opportunity to use one of the most powerful tools of the last century: the Internet.

And the fact is that when taking into account our current situation, where we’re all being put in check by the coronavirus pandemic, many people have turned to the web: more for entertainment than ever, remote work, or simply to get information. That being said, is everyone being granted the same privilege of access?

"If you think about how to make it easier for a robot to read code, you are inherently thinking about people who have different abilities."

When Tim Berners-Lee named the World Wide Web (WWW) along with HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) he imagined using these tools as a way to escape "database boundaries" so that information would no longer be centralized, and would be enriched through dispersion across the globe.

In this context, Berners-Lee's thinking continues to make sense today. But, not everyone follows his philosophy, the founder of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)—an international consortium that generates recommendations and standards for the web—when building the web, perhaps out of ignorance, or laziness.

Leaving clues along the way

Building a website goes well beyond the front-facing aesthetics that it may display to the user when showing content, colors, logos and images. In fact, a website needs to perform an even greater task that most people are not aware of. The question is... Do all developers follow through?

We’ll get to what the greater task is, but the answer to the question is “no.” Because of not following through on this greater task, one of the results is that many entities or enterprises often don't understand why their brand or company isn’t appearing in the search engines of the various browsers. They aren’t clear in understanding what they lack.

When we talk about search engines, we need to envision a robot that is reading constantly, all the time. This bot needs a guide of sorts to be able to follow the correct path and understand what it’s reading. This bot needs "clues" so that it can read all the content that it wants to present to the public.

These "clues" are relevant for virtual crawlers, and are achieved by making sites accessible with the implementation of labeled and well organized hierarchical headings (on page SEO), which contain an understandable language: a navigation through the keyboard tab, giving the possibility to explore a whole page through this key. Colors and texts that contrast, so that there is a total visibility of the messages and content, HTML attributes which explain and describe the action of a button or the display of a modal, and other features that provide clarity and context.