Accessibility: Why Should Business Analysts Care? 

Nowadays, accessibility is becoming increasingly popular in all spheres of life. In this article, we look at the importance of accessibility and explain why and when business analysts should pay attention to it.

First, let’s define accessibility and disability in a business context.

Web accessibility is making your websites usable by as many people as possible. Making sites accessible benefits people with disabilities and other groups, including those using mobile devices or those with a slow network connection.

Surprised? For context, many things mentioned in accessibility regulations help your website become more SEO-friendly.

Another important thing to understand is what disability means. Many people think only of visual or hearing disabilities. However, it’s far more than that. Even a broken finger could limit your ability to navigate your phone. Being accessible is important because there are many reasons someone might need specific accessible features.

There are other benefits to ensuring accessibility. In addition to the requirement for public resources to meet a certain level of accessibility, it can actually benefit your SEO. Search engines now take into account not just how well you organize all SEO information, but also to which level you are accessible. Hence, to appear in the top results on search pages, you should make sure that your site is easy to use.

When should a business analyst care?

From my point of view, business analysts should consider or question the need for accessibility as soon as it makes sense. It's better to do this before development starts so that we avoid rework.

There are two approaches to understanding and specifying accessibility requirements: standard and testing tooling.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the organization that creates and maintains standards for the World Wide Web. Accessibility standards can be found on their website in the accessibility guidelines section (the recent standard is WCAG 2.0).

WCAG 2.0 has four main principles (perceivable, operable, understandable and robust). Each principle has guidelines that need to be followed to be compliant with a certain level of accessibility. The good news is that only three levels (A, AA, AAA) exist. 

Some examples of requirements for different levels

Perceivable - Level A:

• All non-text content presented to the user has a text alternative that serves the equivalent purpose, except for the situations listed below. (1.2.1 WCAG 2.0)
• An alternative for time-based media or audio description of the prerecorded video content is provided for synchronized media, except when the media is a media alternative for text and is clearly labeled as such. (1.2.3 WCAG 2.0)
• When the sequence in which content is presented affects its meaning, a correct reading sequence can be programmatically determined. (1.3.2 WCAG 2.0)

Perceivable - Level AA:

• Except for captions and images of text, text can be resized up to 200 percent without assistive technology and without loss of content or functionality.

Perceivable - Level AAA:

• The visual presentation of text and images of text has a contrast ratio of at least 7:1 (1.4.6 WCAG 2.0)

Operable - Level A:

• All content functionality is operable through a keyboard interface without requiring specific timings for individual keystrokes, except where the underlying function requires input that depends on the path of the user's movement and not just the endpoints. (2.1.1 WCAG 2.0). 

All details can be checked here.

This was just a brief overview to get you started with the accessibility requirements on your project. If you are interested in a career at EPAM, check out our business analyst jobs and apply.