What are the four pillars of digital accessibility?

Digital accessibility is fundamental in a society where awareness of the needs of people with disabilities has become increasingly strong and where we want to ensure the respect of everyone’s rights. To achieve digital accessibility, it is essential to guide your activities by following 4 fundamental principles: let’s take a look at them together

What is the digital accessibility

‍Digital accessibility is a complex but essential issue. It is about the possibility of guaranteeing people with disabilities the full and enjoyable use of the computer services offered. Essentially, a website is accessible if people with disabilities can take advantage of the functions it offers without any limitations. Clearly, the measures to be adopted for this to happen vary depending on the user’s disability. That’s why there is no univocal definition of accessibility, but it must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

‍What are the four cornerstone principles of digital accessibility?‍

The four cornerstone principles of digital accessibility are outlined by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). This body is part of the United Nations (UN) and is responsible for managing and standardizing the web world, creating common languages and rules that allow communication within various computer systems. The W3C is precisely in charge of digital accessibility, as part of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). To this end, four principles have been determined that must underpin digital accessibility. A digital product is therefore accessible if it is:

• Perceivable
• Operable
• Understandable
• Robust

Let’s look at them one by one.

‍Perceivable  According to WCAG 2.1, the requirement of perceivability means that “information and user interface components must be presented to users in ways they can perceive.” For example, if it is a video content, subtitles must be present for people with hearing disabilities; for people with visual disabilities, there must be an audio description.

‍Operable Operability requires that a user can use all components and navigation of the user interface. For example, components with flashing or flickering must be able to be disabled to avoid issues for users with photosensitive epilepsy. Pages must also be navigable, with indications of headings and subheadings, as well as certain pointer-related adjustments.

‍Understandable  Understandability requires that information and operations of the user interface must be understandable. This includes, for example, the ability to set the preferred language for each page or the predictability of content (without abrupt changes in the organization or structure of pages).

‍Robust  Finally, web content must be robust, meaning “it must be robust enough to be reliably interpreted by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies.” This principle includes compatibility with existing user agents, especially assistive technologies such as screen readers for people with visual disabilities.

‍How to find out if your website is accessible? In light of what has been written above, you will certainly be curious to find out if your website meets these requirements. In fact, it is essential that this happens, since only in this way people with disabilities will be able to enjoy your content: if this were impossible for them, you would suffer serious damage. To find out if your website is accessible, you can quickly and freely use the accessibility validator of AccessiWay: click here to use it!