In the digital age, more and more institutions, including schools, are creating their own websites, but not all of them comply with digital accessibility requirements. Accessibility problems can make it significantly harder for people with disabilities to use websites, which can lead to exclusion and violations of their rights. In this article, we present the most common problems that make websites unfriendly to users with disabilities, and explain why avoiding them is crucial for institutions such as schools.

Plugins will not adapt a website to WCAG requirements for us.

So let’s look at the most common problems to solve.

1. Unintuitive navigation

Complex and unintuitive navigation makes it difficult for people with mobility impairments to move around a website. Missing key keyboard shortcuts or incorrectly labelled navigation elements are examples of barriers often encountered by users who use a keyboard instead of a mouse.

2. Missing alternative descriptions for images

One of the most common problems is missing alt text for images, which means that blind or partially sighted people using screen readers cannot access the content contained in graphics. An example might be a school website where, instead of a description of a photo from a school event, the user only hears information that no description is available.

3. Poor colour contrast

Insufficient contrast between the text and the background is another common problem that makes content difficult for people with visual impairments to read. This particularly applies to website templates that use light shades, such as yellow text on a white background. Plugins can change colours here and can actually handle this aspect quite effectively. However, it is important to remember that content may appear against background images, and things will not look so rosy there.

4. Missing appropriate ARIA attributes

Interactive elements such as buttons or forms must have appropriate ARIA attributes (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) to be recognised by screen readers. Without these attributes, users cannot understand how to use the website’s features, which is particularly problematic with registration or contact forms. In CMS platforms such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal (and probably others too), we can use additional modules or plugins. They are not always written with WCAG principles in mind, and when they are, the descriptions are often in English. A mixture of languages is also treated as a failure to meet WCAG principles.

5. Inappropriate heading structures

Another problem is an incorrect heading hierarchy, which makes navigation using screen readers difficult. Without a proper HTML structure, users cannot browse content logically, which significantly increases navigation time. Blind people also use shortcuts and treat headings like a menu (to put it simply). Unfortunately, it is very common for an editor to add an h4 heading after an h2 heading in the content “because it looks right”. This usage is incorrect. Heading structure should be hierarchical, just as when writing a book. We recommend reading them 😉