How to Maintain the Accessibility of Your Site

Making your website accessible to people with disabilities is a continuous process. When you have made your site as accessible as possible, you need to do certain steps to maintain its accessibility. These steps, however, are relatively easy and they do not cost much.

Here are the things you can do to ensure your web site maintains accessibility.

Ensure All NEW Content is Accessible

Apart from your web pages, you normally have documents in your site that users can open or download. Make sure that all existing files in your site such as word documents, spreadsheets, and PDF files are accessible.

For this purpose, you can provide accessibility training to your staff. This ensures that they would be able to implement accessibility while they are working on documents. This prevents you from spending too much time in modifying existing documents to confirm with accessibility standards. This also ensures that in the future, all documents in your site will be accessible.

Perform Accessibility Reviews

You need to perform accessibility reviews on your site while doing quality assurance tests on it. An accessibility review is a process wherein an evaluator checks if your site has accessibility issues. Once you have obtained the results of the review, you can work on the issues to improve the accessibility of the site.

Before letting the reviewer check your site, see to it that the criteria to be used meet the accessibility standards and legislation you have to comply with. The time interval between reviews generally differs from one site to another. This may depend on how often new content is posted on your site.

Create and Update an Accessibility Statement

An accessibility statement is a document in your site whose purpose may include one or more of the following:

• Affirm your site’s compliance to accessibility standards and legislation
• Provide instructions to users of assistive technology
• Address currently inaccessible parts and features of the site

Using this document, you can keep track of your changes and improvements related to accessibility. Similarly, visitors of your site can use your accessibility statement to see if they can determine issues in your site.

Remember to update your accessibility statement after each review. This helps you make sure that all points in the accessibility statement are accurate and valid.