Accessibility

‍Regardless of regulation, making your website accessible to everyone is a basic responsibility, one that benefits us all, including ourselves, in a less fortunate future. What Sitely can do to help is making it as streamlined and simple as possible, and comply with the relevant WCAG criteria that all regulations are based on.

‍Sitely websites, by virtue of being very plainly coded, are inherently very accessible.

‍Accessibility compliance is complex and nuanced, so much so that there isn’t a single tool that will give you a 100% compliance assessment, most will only point out some of the more glaring issues. Full coverage of the accessibility requirements is a process of progressive updates and refinements, for both Sitely and for your website.

‍A button with a label doesn’t need anything special for accessibility to work with it, but if the button contains an image and no label, requires you to set the “Link Description”. Likewise for more complex situations where a label is not available, the link description gives informs accessibility tools about the meaning of the link. Sitely’s website assistant has a check for that.

A screenshot of a website assistant tool highlighting an accessibility issue with an empty label for a link description, alongside options for link settings.

‍Form labels

‍Another new type of information you need to add for accessibility purposes is the relationship between form fields and their label. For example a form asking for an email address using a text input and a text label will now clarify the relationship by expressly setting the text block as the label for that text input.

‍The modern and space efficient design pattern to use the placeholder as a label is also directly supported, by setting the placeholder as a floating label, and make that the accessibility label at the same time. This is what is looks like:

Form design interface showing an email address input field with settings for text input and label options.

Text legibility
Another accessibility issue is when the text contrast over the background is insufficient for good readability. We have a check for that as well. What’s unique in Sitely, meaning we know of no tool that will do this for your website, is the check for text contrast over a background image, where Sitely will check each individual character for contrast and provide a detailed visual pinpointing the issue, like this.

A foggy forest background with the text "Sitely is awesome" and a pop-up window displaying an accessibility alert.

‍Image descriptions

‍A time consuming step in adding accessibility to a website is to add descriptions to images, which is well in range of what an AI can do today, so we use OpenAI for this and send a small version of the image over to their servers and add the description for you.

Color and Gradients

‍Form labels

‍Image descriptions