Designing a career site with accessibility in mind adds ensuring equal access, promotes diversity, and enhances the overall candidate experience. This inclusivity is essential for attracting a diverse pool of talent. By incorporating accessibility and usability leading practices into the career site design, also known as Universal Design, you can enhance the user experience for all potential candidates, making it easier for them to find relevant information, apply to jobs, and engage with the career site features without requiring special adaptation.
Designing the Career Site using accessibility guidelines
Objective
After completing this lesson, you will be able to design the site by using accessibility guidelines.
Design of Accessible Career Sites
Global Accessibility Guidelines
Many countries follow general accessibility guidelines to ensure that their websites aim to create a more inclusive online environment for everyone. Considerations include:
Accessibility laws: Many parts of the world adhere to accessibility laws. For example, in Canada, private, public, and non-profit organizations with 50+ employees must ensure that their websites are accessible.
Accessibility principles: The accessibility guidelines are organized around four principles: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. Each guideline has three levels of accessibility: A, AA, and AAA. Visit the Guidelines Overview to learn more: https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG): WCAG is developed through the W3C process in cooperation with individuals and organizations around the world, with a goal of providing a single shared standard for web content accessibility that meets the needs of individuals, organizations, and governments internationally. The WCAG documents explain how to make web content more accessible to people with disabilities. Accessibility involves a wide range of disabilities, including visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, language, learning, and neurological disabilities.
Online accessibility checker: You can use an online tool to check if your website is accessible. Using an online accessibility checker does not guarantee that you will find all accessibility issues with your website. It is important to have a person review the site as well.
Accessibility Software Applications: WAVE
Supporting software application like WAVE can be used to test accessibility issues and requirements within a website. To access more information on WAVE, use the following link:Â https://wave.webaim.org/.
When using WAVE, consider the following:
WAVE cannot tell you if web content is accessible. Only a human can determine true accessibility. But WAVE can help evaluate the accessibility of web content.
WAVE includes many checks for accessibility issues found in the Section 508 and WCAG 2.1 guidelines. But WAVE cannot check all of the issues in these guidelines; no automated tool can.
To use WAVE, access the form at https://wave.webaim.org/, enter the web page address of your page, and submit the form. There are site-wide WAVE tools (https://wave.webaim.org/sitewide) for easily evaluating numerous pages.
Accessibility Software Applications: Screen Readers
To support software applications such as screen readers, include the following considerations:
Screen readers are software programs that convert digital text into synthesized speech. They allow users who work with a screen reader to read the text that is displayed on the computer screen.
Screen readers announce the page title (the <title> element in the HTML markup) when first loading a web page.
Screen readers announce headings and identify the heading level. NVDA and JAWS, for example, precede <h1> headings with "heading level 1".
Screen readers generally inform users that a piece of text (or a graphic) is a link. Most screen readers say "link" before each link. For example, a "products" link would be read as "link products" by JAWS.
Alt text or alternate text is an attribute added to an image tag in HTML. This text appears inside the image container when the image cannot be displayed and helps search engines understand what an image is about.
If alt text is present, screen readers will read the alternative text of images. JAWS precedes the alternative text with the word "graphic." If the image is a link, JAWS precedes the alternative text with "graphic link".
Screen readers ignore images without alternative text and say nothing, but users can set their preferences to read the file name.
Navigation in Screen Readers
Navigation in screen readers includes the following considerations:
Audio interfaces present content linearly to users, one item at a time. Despite the linear nature of audio interfaces, screen readers do provide ways for users to navigate content quickly.
One way is to use the Tab key to jump from link to link. This gives the user an idea of where the page links to, and can be a useful way to run through the content if the user is looking for a specific link. A related technique is to obtain a list of the links on the page, arranged alphabetically. The drawback of these methods is that the user does not hear any of the non-link content, and may miss important information this way.
Another way to get an overall impression of a page's content is to jump from heading to heading. Users can hear an outline of the page's main ideas, then backtrack to read the parts they are most interested in. The main drawback to this technique is that it relies on headings, so it is important that they are included. To the extent possible, the headings should represent an accurate outline of the content.
Users can navigate via ARIA landmarks and HTML5 sectioning elements, such as <main>, <nav>, <header>, and so on.
Users can jump from paragraph to paragraph, listening to the first sentence or two before moving on to the next paragraph. When possible, place the distinguishing information of a paragraph in the first sentence.
Skip links at the top of the page allow users to bypass the main navigation and go directly to the main content. They speed up the reading process and help users distinguish between the main navigation and the main content.
Accessibility Guidelines for Career Site Builder
To ensure a Career Site Builder site is accessible, consider the following points:
- Ensure metadata is created to allow screen readers to access and read career site content.
- Pay attention to the structure of the content, including page headings and navigation.
- Design images, forms, and media with accessibility in mind, ensuring the inclusion of alt text.
Summary
- Design career sites with accessibility features to promote inclusivity, user-friendly experiences, and attract diverse talent.
- Follow accessibility principles (perceivable, operable, understandable, robust) and adhere to WCAG guidelines for compliance.
- Build structured, metadata-supported content to enhance accessibility and usability for all candidates.