Accessibility: opening
your door a little wider

Let me start with a number.

Roughly one in four adults across Europe lives with a disability of some kind.

One in four.

That is not a small corner of the market. That is a quarter of everybody who might come to Ireland, a quarter of everybody who might want to do exactly what you do, sitting at home this evening looking at websites.

And if yours does not work for them, they will book with somebody whose does. Without a word to you about it.

Now, when I say disability, I want to widen the picture straight away, because the one most people carry around is far too narrow.

When people hear accessibility, they tend to imagine one particular visitor. Somebody blind, using a screen reader. Somebody in a wheelchair. Those are real, and they matter. But they are a fraction of the people this affects.

So think instead about somebody going through your website using only the keyboard, because a shoulder injury has made the mouse painful.

Think about an older traveller, and older travellers are a growing and very valuable market for this country, whose eyes are not what they were, trying to read pale grey text on a white background.

Think about somebody with colour blindness who genuinely cannot tell your booking button apart from the rest of the page.

Think about a person who reads slowly, or who finds dense text hard going, and who needs plain language and a clear path to get anywhere.

Think about somebody perfectly able-bodied sitting outside a café in bright sun, squinting at a phone, unable to make out text that has not got enough contrast behind it.

Every one of those is a customer. And every one of them will decide within a few seconds whether your website is working for them. If it is not, they will not ring up to complain and they will not send an email. They will just go.

The booking you never knew you lost is the most common result of a website that shuts people out.

Now, here is the thing that changes the whole conversation for most people I talk to about this.

When your website works for people with disabilities, it works better for everybody.

A proper heading structure helps a screen reader, and it also makes the page far easier for anybody to skim.

Good colour contrast helps somebody with low vision, and it also means your text can be read on a phone on a bright day in a car park.

Keyboard navigation helps somebody who cannot use a mouse, and it also forces a cleaner, more logical structure that benefits everyone who lands there.

Descriptive text on your images helps somebody who cannot see them, and it also helps Google understand what those images are of, which does you no harm at all in search.

So accessibility and good design are not two things pulling against each other. They are the same thing, approached from an angle that makes you think harder about every decision.

The standard to work to is WCAG two point two, at AA level. That is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and AA is the level that legislation across Europe and the UK has increasingly been built around. In practice it means proper headings. Descriptive text on every image that carries information. Everything reachable by keyboard. Text you can actually read. Forms that behave themselves with assistive technology.

And none of that is exotic, and none of it is expensive, when it is built in from the start.

It becomes a real job of work when it has to be retrofitted onto a site that was built without a thought for it. Which is the honest reason this is a decision about how you build, rather than something you bolt on at the end.

There is one more thing worth saying, and it is the part that tends to land.

A lot of people with a disability plan their trips more carefully than anybody else, precisely because they have to. They research harder. They read further. They look for the business that has clearly thought about them, and when they find it, they are loyal in a way you would not believe, and they tell people.

So this is not only about not losing a quarter of the market. There is a genuine advantage sitting there for whoever in your area bothers first. And in most areas, nobody has.

There is one more thing worth saying, and for tourism in particular it might be the most valuable part of this whole chapter.

Accessibility is not only about how your website behaves. It is also about what your website tells people.

Because a visitor with a mobility issue, or a parent with a buggy, or somebody coming with an elderly mother, has one question before they can even consider booking you. Will this work for us?

And almost no tourism website in Ireland answers it.

So tell them. Plainly, honestly, without any spin. How far is the walk from the car park, and what is underfoot. Are there steps, and how many. Is there a toilet, and can a wheelchair get into it. Is the ground even. Is there somewhere to sit down. Is there an accessible parking space and how close is it.

And be honest when the answer is no. Nobody is offended by a business saying the path is rough and not suitable for a wheelchair. What people find hard is arriving to discover it, having driven two hours.

Honest access information gets shared. It gets passed around forums and groups and family WhatsApps, because it is so rare and so useful. And the people who find it tend to book, and come back, and bring others.

There is a genuine advantage sitting there for whoever in your area bothers first. And in most areas, nobody has.

So what can you do this week? Three jobs.

The first one. Try to use your own website with the keyboard alone. No mouse, no trackpad. Tab to move between things, Enter to choose. Can you reach every page? Can you get the whole way through a booking without touching the mouse once? If you cannot, then neither can somebody who relies on it. And I would do this one first, tonight, because it takes five minutes and it is usually an education.

The second. Look hard at the text on your site and ask whether somebody with middling eyesight could read it comfortably. Is there enough contrast between the words and the background? Is the body text big enough on a phone? Pale grey text on white is the single most common problem on the internet and it is usually a designer's choice, not a technical constraint, which means it can be changed this afternoon.

And the third. Check whether your images have alternative text on them. That is the short description a screen reader reads aloud in place of the picture. Anything purely decorative needs none. But every image carrying real information, your location, your activity, your team, needs a brief honest description. Most tourism websites have none of this at all, and it is a quick job for whoever looks after your site.

And here is what I want to leave you with.

Your first hello should work for every single person who finds you.

Not most of them. All of them.

Accessibility is not an extra, and it is not a specialist concern for a small number of people. It is simply what a well-built website looks like.