Ep. 12: Why Businesses are Lagging Behind on Web Accessibility — and What Needs to Be Done About It

In the beginning, the Web was pretty much accessible for everyone....because it was originally text based. In 2023, web-page technology and design has advanced light years beyond the original hypertext markup language (HTML) used to build the world’s first websites.  

But is accessibility....that universal power of the Web referred to by its inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, keeping pace with modern web technology and design?  

More often than not today, websites are the first point of customer contact for any organization. Anyone looking for information is going to go to your website first. 

But here’s the thing: The WebAim Million 2023 Report on the Accessibility of the Top One Million Web Pages found that 96.3% of home pages have WCAG 2.0 failures. And that’s down only slightly from 96.8% in 2022. 

This episode, we explore why businesses are still lagging behind on making their websites accessible, and what needs to happen to get the Web back to that universality regardless of disability that Tim Berners-Lee envisioned.  

We get our three guests’ different web accessibility perspectives on what needs to happen and how to get there; and what we might expect with web accessibility in the years ahead. Listen to this engaging conversation with Ran Ronen, David Berman and Sabine Lobnig.  

 

Read the WebAim Million 2023 report: https://webaim.org/projects/million/