When the Internet launched, it was called the “information superhighway”. That highway now runs through every part of our daily lives. But for people with vision problems or those who use assistive technologies to access websites, this highway can be hard to navigate.

Close to 96% of website homepages contain accessibility errors, making it difficult or impossible for users with visual, hearing, motor, and cognitive impairments to use the site. Often, website owners include accessibility widgets or overlays with the intent of making their site more accessible. Instead, they have the opposite effect. In fact, approximately 20% of accessibility lawsuits are against websites with these widgets.

For those with visual impairments, hearing loss, and conditions that are triggered by motion, they frequently use browser or computer based tools to help them interact with all websites. Accessibility widgets can interfere with those tools, making it more challenging to interact with a particular website. Improperly coded websites are also more challenging to interact with.

That’s why we need to build better “roads”!

Think of it this way:

You have a car. You like your car. You have everything adjusted the way you like it. One day, you are driving to a new place you just heard about and are excited to check it out. When you get to the road leading up to this place, there’s a roadblock.

The guard at the roadblock says you can’t drive your own car down that road because the road wasn’t built well. Instead, you must use their special car. Their car doesn’t have all the features your car does, you can’t adjust the seats and because the road wasn’t built well, you still hit potholes. But your only choices are to use their car to drive down the bad road or not go at all.

This is what it’s like to force someone to use an accessibility widget on your site instead of just making your website accessible in the first place.

Don’t put roadblocks in the way of people trying to get to your site. Don’t force them to use different tools on your site than they use everywhere else. Instead, build a better road that everyone can use!