Web accessibility is critical to a fully open society. In America alone, over 20 million people are blind or visually impaired. The ability to use the Internet is essential for finding work, maintaining your finances, shopping, making travel plans, and more.
But many organizations unwittingly throw up roadblocks to access by building inaccessible websites.
The American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) is committed to the highest levels of accessibility on our websites, and is an example for other organizations hoping to offer robust, fully-featured sites of their own. Here are some specific examples of how we have designed our sites to be accessible to people who are blind or have low vision, and easy to use by everyone:
- We provide meaningful text alternatives (alt-text) for all images, and label our forms clearly and correctly.
- We provide viewing alternatives for all multimedia — videos are described and captioned, and transcripts are provided for all video and audio files. Our accessible embedded HTML5 video player is easy to control with keyboard commands.
- We give users the ability to change or increase the text size, and use stylesheets so that visitors can easily change the colors of the site using their system preferences.
- Our flyout menus work for mouse users, touch screens, visitors with low vision, and people using screen readers.
- The same attention to clean, responsive code means that AFB's sites are optimized for mobile devices.
AFB understands that information is power. We are committed to connecting people to life-changing information, resources, local services, and a vibrant and supportive community via our award-winning family of websites. That requires making them as accessible as possible—for everyone.
Visit our digital inclusion and accessibility resources for tips on how to increase the accessibility and usability of your website.
