If you’re working toward WCAG compliance for #accessibility on your #WordPress website, check out this Free Statement Generator that can help you address the legal side of things. Best practices (in my opinion) is to think of your audience first and design / develop for them first. Educate yourself with the resources below so that you can understand what simple changes might be able to be made, and what more complex user experience testing may be required.
Free Accessibility Statement Generator
https://www.w3.org/WAI/planning/statements/
https://www.experte.com/accessibility
What is Website Accessibility & More tools
https://youtu.be/ep4ED7SzdLs
WCAG Fundamentals
https://www.w3.org/WAI/fundamentals/accessibility-intro/
Accessibility Guidelines
https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/
Google’s Take on Web Accessibility
https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/accessibility/
Divi & Accessibility
https://www.elegantthemes.com/blog/tips-tricks/how-to-evaluate-and-improve-your-website-with-accessibility-testing
Accessibility Testing Tools
https://wave.webaim.org/
https://www.webaccessibility.com/
Full Video Transcript
– Hey all, my name is Kori Ashton. Today I’m gonna be showing you a free generator tool that’s gonna help you create and write an accessibility statement for your WordPress website. Let’s get to it. So first of all, what is web accessibility and why is it important to us? It means that your website and the tools and technologies are all being designed and developed so that people with disabilities can use them. So anybody can come to your website and easily and quickly navigate, check out, read, watch, listen. Whatever we’re giving, whatever we’re trying to engage with on our website, we wanna build it in such a way that anybody can actually use those tools, access our website and be able to function easily and quickly through our website. Accessibility is actually gaining a lot of popularity these days, and not always as a willing addition to a website, companies are getting sued, so I would definitely recommend that you pay attention and that you work toward compliance on your own website. If you really don’t understand what accessibility is, I have a video that I did back in 2019. I’ll put a link to it here that explains a lot more of what accessibility is, how you can be compliant and a couple other resources and tools. If you’d like to go check that out, please do so. But if you have been working on your accessibility for your website, it is important that you actually have a statement. I’ll show you a quick example of what I’m using on Ask Kori. It’s very straightforward, very simple, but I didn’t write all this by myself. I wanted to use a tool to do this. You’re gonna have your blanket statement of this is who we are. This is our conformance status of what level we’re trying to conform to and then other considerations, and then of course contact information and feedback information.
So let me show you the tool that I use to create this. So the tool that I’ve found that I’m super excited about all in the budget of free is this tool right here. Again, I’ll put the link in the description box below, so you can check that out. So all you need to do is click on generate an accessibility statement. That opens up this page, and you can start to just fill out your information down the page. So I have my name and my organization, my website, the name of the website, accessibility standards applied, right? So if you feel confident and you’ve tested up to double A, then absolutely put that. If it’s not yet, go ahead and list out what you believe you comply with. And if you don’t know, I do have a couple of other tools that you can actually check your website with. So I will list those in the description box below as well. Conformance status. Again, just kind of read through these and say, “Okay, I’m probably partially conformant, but I’m working on it. I just want you to be aware that I’m working on it and it is important to us.” So you can certainly choose what’s applicable here to you, and just go ahead and fill out the rest of the content. This section here is actually important to fill out, especially if you’re using any third party content, or if you have contributors coming to your site. So just read through and try to answer as best to your ability. All the way down, keep going all the way down. There’s quite a bit here. And then you can land on approval and complaints process, so if somebody does have a complaint or maybe some feedback, you can fill out the contact information there and then click preview your accessibility statement. And there you go. There’s your statement. You can either just copy from here onto your clipboard and go over to your website and make this page or you can download this as an HTML page, make it as well with that simple click and upload it to your WordPress website. Of course, to add it to your site, it’s easily done just by creating a page, dropping the content in there. The other thing that I did was I created a link in my footer. Down there next to privacy policy statement, I created the accessibility statement link so that people can get to that and understand how to connect with us, especially if they have feedback for improvements.
So I hope you’re able to take time to really understand what accessibility is and the importance of it and everything that we’re doing digitally, whether it’s on your website or even just throughout in your social media, your blog, anywhere else that you’re trying to communicate online. All right, I hope you liked this video. Please click like and subscribe. Hang out with me here every single week, as I’m helping you improve your online marketing inside the world of WordPress. If you are trying to do that, check out over 400 other videos I have here on my channel and I’ll see you all next week. Bye, everyone.
