Accessibility 101: Build your
accessible website

Hi, my name is Henry, and I'm a learning designer at Wix.

For much of my career I've developed and written courses to improve inclusion, diversity and equal access to education.

One of our most basic objectives here at Wix is to positively contribute to the creation of an internet that everyone can access, use and benefit from.

That's why, in this course, I'm going to show you how to build your site for accessibility.

I'm going to do this by rebuilding my own site from scratch within the Wix Editor.

You can follow along and build your own site from scratch if you like, or you can just add all of the features that your site needs to become as accessible as possible.

You see, according to the World Health Organization, over one billion people worldwide have a disability, and that number is increasing.

So in terms of web design, we generally think about 4 different categories of disability.

We've got visual, which means things like blindness, or heavy sightedness.

We also think about auditory, and that can be things like profound deafness or hard of hearing.

And we also think about motor limitations.

So that can be something anything from full paralysis to just minor limited motor function.

And then we also finally think about cognitive disabilities.

And that can include things like ADHD, dyslexia, or autistic spectrum disorder.

Now, of course, accessibility isn't just about people with permanent disabilities, it's about catering to those who may have temporary and situational limitations as well.

Studies show that at any given time around the world, 25% of the global population has a permanent, temporary or situational disability.

So why would we exclude potentially a quarter of the entire global market from accessing our website?

And disabilities aren't the only numbers increasing, either.

More and more countries around the world are creating laws to enforce web accessibility.

So not only is it important from a moral standpoint, but no matter where you are, web accessibility either already is or soon will be the law.

But look, it doesn't have to seem like this daunting task that you've got to take on, because it's actually pretty simple.

Made simpler still by the fact that we at Wix have designed loads, I mean, dozens of templates that you can use that are already accessibility ready.

We've also designed all of our features to be accessibility compliant and to help you create a website that your users can actually interact with and access.

So the way that we do that is we align all of our products with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG, for short.

So these guidelines are published by the Web Accessibility Initiative, and they can help site designers like you to audit a website for accessibility.

Now, the beauty of these guidelines is that they can help device manufacturers to meet your website in the middle.

Basically, there are loads of different assistive technology devices, like screen readers, dictation, eye gaze machines, and there's loads of bespoke ones as well.

You could make one as well, if you wanted to.

But most of these device manufacturers will also build their devices to meet WCAG in the middle.

So when you design your site with WCAG, you can meet every single one of these devices without ever having to think about each one individually.

Now, I'm going to start building my website from scratch.

But with Wix, you don't have to if you don't want to.

If you'd like to use one of our accessibility-ready templates, all you've got to do is go into Create New Site in the templates menu, just type "accessible", and Return.

And you'll find dozens upon dozens of different accessible templates that you can use to start in a really good place.

Now, before we move on, I do need to say this: we at Wix cannot guarantee that your site will be compliant.

That's not a disclaimer, It's just that we can't.

No one can.

Every single region has different laws on accessibility.

And in the States, it actually varies from state to state, and it can depend on what website you're using.

For example, is your website hosted in Canada, but user facing in the UK, but you pay someone else in South Africa?

Well, all of those things contribute to what rules you need to use on your accessible site.

So where we're going to show you how to make your site accessible to your users, if you really want to be legally compliant you can hire a professional, legally-qualified accessibility advisor who understands your local laws.

So now it's time to get stuck into the action.

In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to set your site language, how to set up your page and page titles for accessibility, how to make an accessible menu, how to provide enough navigation options for your users, and how to make your form fields more accessible.

See you there.