The Accessibility Statement: Write Yours, Read Theirs

Before I dive into this week’s topic, I need to say up front that I’m not an attorney and not providing legal advice. Everything here is based on my experience in digital accessibility. With that out of the way, let’s get into it.

There’s a page I’d encourage every creative to add to their website, and it’s one almost no creative thinks about. In some cases, even large companies don’t have one.

It isn’t your product pages. It isn’t your about page or your shop. It’s your accessibility statement, and you can write a solid one before your coffee gets cold.

An accessibility statement is a short page that says two things in plain language: accessibility matters to me, and here’s how to reach me if something on this site doesn’t work for you. That’s the whole job. It’s part welcome mat, part open door.

Start with the person on the other end. Someone using a screen reader, the software that reads a page aloud for people who are blind or have low vision, lands on your site. Or someone navigating entirely by keyboard, because a motor disability makes a mouse difficult, encounters a button they can’t use, an image with no description, a form they can’t complete.

Without an accessibility statement, that person has no idea whether you’d even want to know. So they do what many of us do when a website doesn’t work. They leave. You never hear about it, you never get to fix it, and you’ve quietly lost an audience member you worked hard to reach.

An accessibility statement changes that. It tells visitors with disabilities that they were expected and they’re welcome. And it gives someone a direct way to tell you when something is broken, so a problem becomes an email you can act on instead of a visitor you lose without ever knowing.

Here’s the part that takes the pressure off: a statement isn’t a claim that your site is perfect. None of us has a flawless site, mine included. It’s a statement of intent, not a certificate of excellence. Progress over perfection applies here as much as anywhere.

There’s another benefit, too. In the United States, accessibility-related legal complaints against websites are a growing concern. You don’t need to freak out about this. In general, a solo creative’s risk is low. But showing that you take accessibility seriously, with a contact email you actually monitor, makes you less of a target. That said, if you’re worried about your exposure, talk to an attorney who has expertise in digital accessibility.

In Content for Everyone, the book I co-wrote with Michele Lucchini, we boil a good statement down to three things:

• Say that accessibility matters to you. One honest sentence.

• Say that you’re working on it. Not “this site is fully accessible.” Something that’s accurate, like “I’m working to make this site usable for everyone, and I’m not finished.”

  • Honesty matters. For example, on the Big Gay Fiction Podcast site we stated that there were older episodes without transcripts, that we were working on the backlist, and that if anyone needed a transcript, they could contact us and we would provide it.

• Give people a way to reach you. At a minimum, an email address, easy to find and easy to use. An address is clearer than burying contact behind a form (especially if you’re not sure if the contact form is accessible).

Three or four paragraphs will do it. You don’t need legal language, and you definitely don’t need to invent anything.

One thing matters more than the wording: having an email address listed only works if you use it. When someone writes to that address, reply promptly, help them finish what they were trying to do on your site, and then fix what caused the problem. A statement with an inbox nobody checks is worse than no statement at all, because it makes a promise of support and then breaks it.

And only post the statement if you’re genuinely doing the work. If there’s no real effort behind it, the words are empty.

For a template, you’re welcome to borrow from the statement I use on JeffAdamsWrites.com. It’s short, plain, and unglamorous, which is exactly right. Put yours in your site footer, alongside your privacy and cookie policies, so it’s reachable from every page.

So far in this Substack, I haven’t dug into the guidelines that define what accessible web content looks like. I’d rather keep things simple here, though I have mentioned them a couple of times.

But when we’re talking about accessibility statements, it’s good to make reference to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, also known as WCAG. If you reviewed the statement on my website, you saw I mentioned that. It tells people reading the statement that you know about the guidelines and it’s what you’re working toward. And that is true. As you apply the techniques I talk about here, you are doing things that are part of those guidelines.

An accessibility statement does a second job for you as well. Once you know what one looks like, you can read other people’s, and that’s genuinely useful when you’re deciding where to spend your money and send your audience.

Think about how much of your creative business runs on other people’s tools and other people’s work. Your site builder. Your email platform. The theme your site is dressed in. The plugins that add your booking calendar, your gallery, your shop. Sometimes a designer or developer you hire outright. Every one of those choices either supports an accessible site or might be undermining it.

Most of the big website builders and email platforms take accessibility reasonably seriously, and they’ll tell you so if you look. You can check for this by searching for the platform’s name plus the word “accessibility,” then looking in the footer of their own site for an accessibility page.

You’ll often find two different things, and the difference is important. One kind of page is about whether the company’s own website is accessible (their accessibility statement). The other kind tells you whether the tool itself is accessible and if you can build accessible things with it. That second kind is what you want: a platform usable for people with disabilities that also helps you produce accessible content.

Themes and plugins are where this gets more difficult to determine. Many say nothing about accessibility at all.

• If you build on WordPress, it offers an “Accessibility Ready” filter when you browse themes, which is a good place to start.

• For plugins, check the listing and documentation for any mention of accessibility. Finding none doesn’t disqualify a plugin, but it tells you the checking falls to you. If there’s an email address, you can reach out to them and ask.

• And if you’re paying for custom work, insist that accessibility is a requirement. When you’re paying, you deserve a product that works for your whole audience. (More on hiring shortly.)

There’s one category of plugin I want to caution you about, because it’s marketed straight at people trying to do the right thing. You’ll come across plugins, widgets, and overlays that promise to make your entire site accessible automatically, often by adding a single line of code. Some are free, some charge a monthly fee.

I urge you not to use them for two reasons.

• Automated tools can only catch a fraction of accessibility issues, so no plugin can genuinely “solve” accessibility on its own, regardless of what the sales page says.

• These plugins have a track record of interfering with screen readers and other assistive technology that people with disabilities already rely on, which can make the experience worse for the very people who need accessibility to work.

If a tool promises a one-click fix for accessibility, treat that promise the way you’d treat any other claim that sounds too good to be true.

A new website, a rebrand, a redesign: any of these is the perfect moment to make sure the person you hire can deliver something accessible. It’s far easier to build that in from the start than to retrofit it later.

Two questions tell you most of what you need to know.

1. “Do you design and build to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines?” If they say no, or they don’t know what you’re asking, keep looking.

2. “How do you test for accessibility?” If the only answer is “we run a scan,” that isn’t enough. You want to hear that they use a scan and manual checks, including navigating by keyboard and testing with a screen reader.

Then do one more thing: look at their own site. Does the designer or developer have an accessibility statement of their own? Is their portfolio easy to move through with a keyboard? Do they do the things I’ve been talking about in this Substack?

People who do this work well show it on their own turf, and now you know some of what to look for.

Open a blank page and write your accessibility statement. Three or four plain paragraphs: accessibility matters to you, you’re working to make your site usable for everyone, and here’s the email address where someone can reach you if something doesn’t work. Use a real address you’ll actually check.

The statement on JeffAdamsWrites.com is there to borrow from. Add it to your footer next to your privacy policy, and you’ll have done something many websites never get around to.

A reminder before you publish: only put the page up once you’re committed to doing the accessibility work.

Next Thursday (July 16): auto-play videos, spinning carousels, and the other moving things that can drive visitors off your site.

See you next Thursday.
— Jeff

Digital Accessibility – Content for Everyone is a free weekly post from Jeff Adams about making your digital content—your site, your podcast, your newsletter, your social media—usable by everyone who shows up to it. Built on the foundation of Content for Everyone, the book Jeff co-wrote with Michele Lucchini. Companion site: contentforeveryone.info.