By Sophie Knight.
There’s a misconception about accessibility that making a digital experience accessible means making it simpler, more conventional (or dare we say it - a bit boring!).
Accessibility is sometimes talked about as though it puts limits on creativity. If an experience involves unusual navigation, lots of interaction or highly visual content, making it accessible can seem like a much bigger challenge.
We’ve recently been working on a project that shows why it doesn’t have to be that way.
The British Museum has launched a new online experience of the Bayeux Tapestry which gives people the opportunity to explore the tapestry online alongside its physical exhibition.
The nature of the tapestry means this was never going to be your average webpage. It’s incredibly detailed so the online experience has been designed to reflect that, allowing people to move horizontally through the tapestry, explore different sections and scenes and discover more as they go.
We’ve been working alongside the Developers at digital agency Numiko and the digital team at the British Museum to make sure that experience is accessible, reviewing it against WCAG 2.2 and helping to identify and address potential issues throughout the build. This raised some really interesting questions about what accessibility looks like when the digital experience you’re creating is deliberately a little different.
Photo credit: Bayeuxmuseum.com
Accessibility is about the experience, not just the checklist
One of the things we particularly liked about this project was the amount of thought that went into how different people would actually experience the tapestry.
Take the visual descriptions. The tapestry contains a huge amount of visual detail, alongside written information within the online experience. For a blind person using a screen reader, simply repeating all of that information would quickly become overwhelming, while leaving out the visual detail would mean losing an important part of the experience.
The British Museum team therefore thought carefully about how to describe each section and scene in a way that gives blind users meaningful visual information without unnecessarily repeating content they can already access elsewhere.
It’s a relatively small example, but it gets to the heart of good accessibility. Following guidelines matters but the real question is whether someone gets an experience that works for them.
Interactive doesn’t have to mean inaccessible
There were plenty of other interesting challenges along the way because this isn’t a standard website.
People can drag and zoom their way through the tapestry, there are different layers of information to explore and the experience needs to work across different devices, screen sizes and levels of zoom. It also needs to make sense to people navigating with a keyboard or using assistive technology.
Some of the issues we found were relatively straightforward to resolve, while others needed more discussion to work out the best approach.
That collaborative problem-solving is an important part of accessibility work, especially when you’re dealing with something more unusual. The answer doesn’t have to be removing an interaction or falling back on the most basic option. Often it’s about understanding what might prevent someone from using it and finding another way to make the experience work.
That leaves much more room for creativity than accessibility sometimes gets credit for.
Bringing accessibility in early makes a difference
Something else that helped on this project was that the accessibility work didn’t begin with the final audit.
We carried out a design accessibility sweep earlier in the process, looking for potential issues before the experience had been fully built. We then stayed involved as the project developed, before carrying out the more comprehensive WCAG 2.2 audit ahead of launch.
It meant accessibility could be considered while Numiko was making design and development decisions, rather than becoming a list of changes to tackle once everything else was finished.
For us, this is a much more useful way to work. When digital stakeholders, developers and accessibility specialists are solving the problem together, you have much more scope to preserve what makes an experience interesting while finding ways for more people to use it.
We should expect more from accessible experiences
Digital accessibility is ultimately about making sure disabled people can access and enjoy the same online world as everyone else. That world includes practical services and everyday websites, but it also includes culture, history and experiences designed to surprise, entertain and engage us.
Making those experiences accessible shouldn’t mean taking away the things that make them interesting.
The Bayeux Tapestry project has been a great example of what can happen when accessibility is embedded from the outset. There have been challenges to work through, as you’d expect with something this interactive, but those challenges have led to thoughtful conversations and better solutions rather than less ambition.
We’d love to see more digital teams approach accessibility in the same way: bring it into the conversation early, give designers and developers the expertise they need to explore different solutions, and keep asking how the experience can work for more people.
Accessible digital experiences can and should be creative, interactive, ambitious and fun so we all get to enjoy an engaging online world.