Why accessibility matters

- [Instructor] Before we dive in, let's first ask ourselves, why does web accessibility matter? What does web accessibility even mean? Who are the users that this impacts? And what's at stake for website owners trying to navigate these issues? In the physical world, we've watched many countries advance laws protecting the rights of people with disabilities. For example, in 1990, the United States passed the Americans with Disabilities Act, the ADA. These laws can ensure access to transportation in public locations, provide reasonable accommodations on the job, and more. Then the internet entered the picture in a widespread way. The internet was invented as a means of sharing information and has evolved into so much more. It is yet another place to take care in ensuring equal access too. But what exactly does that mean? Information has been placed out on the internet and is available for access via web browser or user agent. Browsers can be used by a broad population and are assistive in some ways to those with disabilities, but they don't provide a way to access all content, so some people use hardware and software assistive devices. These include screen readers, screen magnifiers, captioning, voice recognition, alternative keyboards, and alternative pointing devices. This means that websites need to be developed with these devices in mind to ensure they receive all information from the websites. Regardless of the number of people affected, this is a task worth pursuing, but the numbers might surprise you. It is estimated that one in six people worldwide or approximately 1.3 billion people experience a significant disability. This is no small number of people that may have an accessibility need on a website. Add to that, that not all disabilities are permanent, so the estimate is a shifting number. As you can see here, accessibility needs can be permanent, temporary, or situational. We may think of accessibility needs as always being in the permanent column here, touch for example. But perhaps as a new parent, you've found yourself with a baby in your arms and not able to type with both hands, or you had an ear infection and couldn't hear a video on your computer, so you turned on the closed captions. These are situational and temporary accessibility needs, and are also helped out by our work on website accessibility. So what does this mean for website owners? Again, laws vary by country, but in the United States, the Department of Justice, DOJ, has stated that the ADA covers government and public business websites. Web accessibility lawsuits under the ADA are on the rise. Accessibility is not a nice to have or something that can be put off until the end. It should be incorporated into every aspect of the software development lifecycle. And yet, looking at the top million websites on the internet, only about 4% of them are considered fully accessible. The websites that are not accessible contain many of the same issues. One top issue is low contrast text, which we'll learn about and it's very easy to repair. Another issue is missing alternative text for images, which we'll also see is very easy to repair. Once you know how to check for these issues, and I'll show you how, it'll be easy to keep them out of your code base.