Overlay plugins used to be synonymous with accessibility. All you had to do was install one, and voilà — all accessibility issues were solved at the drop of a hat.
The following article is a guest opinion piece produced in partnership with DTTT Partner Creatim.
Overlay plugins used to be synonymous with accessibility. All you had to do was install one, and voilà — all accessibility issues were solved at the drop of a hat. Our moment of revelation came a few years ago when one of our clients asked us to test the proposed user flows with a real person with a disability.
A regular tester would take about three hours to complete 16 assigned user flows. Tim, a visually impaired man, was invited to the testing group, but it was a different story. He was a seasoned, technically savvy online user used to battling inaccessible sites. Despite his arsenal of tactics for overcoming accessibility obstacles, completing only four out of sixteen scenarios took him seven hours. The average person with his level of impairment would need more time and accomplish less.
Watching Tim struggle left us feeling utterly embarrassed. We returned to the drawing board, committed to facilitating accessibility wherever possible. This became part of our agency’s DNA.
According to the World Health Organization, over a billion people worldwide live with various disabilities. To better grasp the scope of accessibility, it’s crucial to understand the range of disabilities that impact online interactions:
Accessible design benefits everyone, not just those with impairments. Everyone will benefit from well-structured, easy-to-read content and streamlined navigation. This article provides a high-level overview of accessibility and how to incorporate it into your workflow.
A destination’s website acts as a digital alter ego of the actual destination. While visitors gather information from various online sources, the website is the only place online where they can establish an emotional connection with the destination brand. If a site lacks accessibility, this impression can quickly extend to the actual location.
Imagine a family that loves travelling with their grandfather despite his walking impairment and limited vision due to glaucoma. He looks forward to the coming holidays but struggles with an inaccessible destination website. Is this how people with disabilities are treated in the location? Will he be confined to a hotel room for the entire week? Feeling bad about their reluctant grandfather not being able to share their excitement, the family decides to look for alternative holiday destinations.
Implementing a digital accessibility programme provides organisations with a structured approach to designing website experiences. It aligns content creators, editors, designers and developers around shared objectives. Here are several compelling reasons why your Destination Marketing Organisation (DMO) should prioritise a digital accessibility programme.
In a quick assessment of 50 European national tourism website homepages using the Accessible Web Helper tool, only the websites of Sweden, Switzerland, Georgia, Armenia and Slovenia achieved a perfect score of 100 out of 100 points. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom, Vatican City, France, the Czech Republic, Finland and Lithuania are making strides to catch up.
It is important to note that a software assessment score doesn’t give the whole picture. It can only indicate that the website has accessibility issues. However, our goal was not to provide in-depth accessibility audits, which could take a month or more for each site, but to rank the sites to get a high-level overview of the state of web accessibility in the industry. Since an algorithm conducted the assessment, the result bears a certain level of objectivity, although unrelated to actual WCAG compliance.
The top ten websites have clearly been designed with accessibility in mind, but even these sites may have areas for improvement.
Creating a truly accessible website starts with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), recognised worldwide as the standard for web accessibility. WCAG provides specific criteria and measures under three main levels of conformance:
The WCAG encourages designers, developers and content creators to use the POUR principles as a foundation for planning accessible solutions that should be:
It should be noted that WCAG guidelines are primarily technical. They should be amended with adequate marketing, content and editorial policies. There are no standards for these; they rely only on best practices.
Assistive technologies are specialised hardware and software designed to help individuals with disabilities perform tasks that may otherwise be difficult or impossible. Some examples include:
Many of the above-mentioned remedies, such as screen readers, text enlargement and keyboard navigation, are already integrated into modern browsers and mobile devices. However, most websites are not optimised to fully support these technologies, leading to inadequate experiences and frustrations. Therefore, it is crucial to create websites and apps that facilitate using both built-in technologies and external devices to enhance the online experience of people with disabilities.
Accessibility goes beyond technical modifications; it requires a shift in mindset throughout the organisation. When developing or enhancing digital experiences, all stakeholders should adopt accessibility as a fundamental design principle. Regular reviews and updates are essential to ensure compliance with the latest guidelines and regulations.
A standard mistake organisations make when implementing accessibility is to focus only on basic requirements or rely on overlay plugins while ignoring more complex issues. They often fail to involve users with different disabilities in the testing process. Such an approach inevitably results in inadequate solutions. Another significant mistake is insufficient employee training and disregarding accessibility as an ongoing process.
Implementing accessibility to existing websites can be challenging. It may require extensive code modifications, which can lead to significant effort. This situation is similar to the construction industry, where it may be more reasonable to tear down an old building and build a new replica rather than attempt to modernise the existing one. While making an existing site accessible can be demanding, designing a new site on accessibility principles may only require some 10% additional effort. It always takes more energy to tear down a wall than to erect one in the first place.
In this regard, a reasonable approach could be to postpone your efforts until a major website redesign. However, users and legislators expect you to act on the problem now, so what can you do? You can’t build an accessible website overnight, especially if the current one suffers serious accessibility issues. However, fixing at least some problems while informing your users about your upgrade plans can move the compliance needle and show your users that you care. For example, you can:
Example: ChatGPT described the image as “Five young men in stylish outfits stand together outdoors, smiling and posing on a bridge with greenery, buildings and a church tower in the background.” Of course, AI does not know who the people in the picture are. "Renowned Slovenian band Joker Out poses on a bridge in Ljubljana, smiling confidently with the city's greenery behind them” would be a much more meaningful description, but it must be manually edited to provide context. The alt-text shouldn’t be too long, as screen readers read them in one go, omitting punctuation, so long descriptions are difficult to understand. While there are no technical limits, it is wise to keep alt-texts under 150 characters.
Promptly providing at least some of the remedies listed above will show your audiences that you are serious about getting accessibility right.
While promptly addressing the most apparent, easy-to-fix issues may be reasonable, a more strategic approach is needed to comply with the WCAG standard. Here’s a step-by-step guide to creating an accessible website.
Initial assessment
Accessibility Audit
Testing
Implementation
Review
Certification
Training
Optimisation
Stakeholders will be consulted to determine objectives and develop the project’s roadmap. Consultants will then be consulted to assess the scope of the Accessibility Audit.
The in-depth analysis of the Accessibility Audit should provide practical guidelines for your design, development, testing and support efforts.
Only testing with real users can provide the whole picture of accessibility. Like any user testing, it is essential that users feel comfortable without any pressure. Usually, they give the most valuable insights when performing the tests on their home computers. This is even more true with individuals with disabilities. They typically use assistive devices, which are inconvenient to carry and use outside their familiar environment. To provide context, they must also be eloquent, actively commenting on their thoughts and feelings while trying to reach their test-defined goal. Their feedback is invaluable for understanding real-world accessibility challenges.
Accommodating blind individuals addresses most web accessibility issues, so they are the people to contact first when conducting accessibility testing. From a technical standpoint, their challenges are the most difficult to overcome. Typically, they require website structure modifications and HTML syntax rethinking to enable meaningful output from screen readers, which no overlay tool can provide.
Visually impaired individuals rely on a keyboard, which will also accommodate people with motor disabilities who can’t use a mouse. In general, a keyboard serves as a central connection point for most assistive devices. In addition to a keyboard, individuals with motor impairment can use voice command software. However, WCAG guidelines do not require voice command features.
Individuals with cognitive and hearing impairments have mostly content-related issues that don’t require significant technical modifications.
When conducting a website upgrade, it is essential to ensure accessibility of content for all users, which includes various functionalities such as:
How to Set Up a Card with Hover so that the screen reader reads the entire card content, not just the interactive element "More"
Several tools help developers and content creators design and review an accessible experience. Here is a checklist by Ashley Firth.
It is wise to allow a third-party expert to review whether induced adjustments meet the criteria outlined in the initial accessibility plan. This phase typically consists of several iterative cycles.
Provide training on accessibility best practices for designers, developers and content creators.
Accessibility isn’t a one-off task — it’s an ongoing commitment. Regularly audit your website, adapt to updated WCAG guidelines and continually gather user feedback.
Overlays refer to technologies designed to enhance website accessibility. They use third-party source code, typically JavaScript, to optimise the website's front-end code. They may adjust the page's contrast, enlarge the text size or enforce other modifications to enhance the experience for users with disabilities.
Accessibility overlay plugins such as AccessiBe, AudioEye or UserWay have grown in popularity recently. Mainly because they seem to provide a quick-fix shortcut compared to the strains of implementing a proper accessibility strategy, which inevitably requires manual work.
However, as the disability community points out, overlays may cause more harm than good in the long run. They do not address the page structure and navigational issues. They can’t provide context crucial for people with disabilities to complete online tasks. Moreover, overlay plugins may conflict with the built-in features and assistive devices that people with disabilities have already installed on their computers. Recently, overlay technology has raised considerable privacy and security concerns.
Organisations that rely on overlays are increasingly perceived as trying to sweep the problem under the rug. The exception is a “Temporary bandage solution” that uses overlay technology to provide at least basic accessibility features while the organisation works on a long-term solution. It is essential to inform your users upfront about such plans.
In general, people with disabilities like to decide how to use assistive technologies by themselves, so “overlays” just get in their way.
The Slovenian Tourism Organisation (STO) aims to set a standard for online accessibility. Recently, it decided to upgrade the national portal slovenia.info to comply with WCAG guidelines. The portal contains tens of thousands of pages in seven languages, so the project posed a substantial challenge.
They entrusted Creatim with conducting the accessibility audit and technical implementation, while their internal team concentrated on editorial policy adjustments and content upgrades.
Creatim started with educational workshops and project planning early last year, followed by an accessibility audit and upgrade implementation in the second half of the year. Since the WCAG criteria pertain mainly to technical adjustments, slovenia.info is now deemed compliant with WCAG standards and, by extension, with EU legislation.
But the actual heavy lifting lies with the editors.
Although the WCAG guidelines do not specifically mention editorial policy, it is essential to creating an accessible user experience. Therefore, STO editors had to manually review and improve a considerable amount of content and images. While much of the content and alt-texts already existed, they required enhancement to ensure clarity and context. This review process is expected to continue until the end of this year.
At Creatim, we believe the Internet is not about technology. It is about people. Hence, providing equal access to information for all is a pivotal element of our mission. We create digital solutions that meet the highest accessibility standards. We offer various accessibility-related services, such as auditing, planning, UX, usability testing and technical implementation. We work with users with disabilities and seek innovative approaches to designing accessible digital solutions.
With over twenty years of experience, we’ve helped organisations transform their online presence and deliver meaningful results. We’re proud to partner with DMOs and forward-thinking tourism businesses that share our mission to create a more inclusive digital world.
The following article is a guest opinion piece produced in partnership with DTTT Partner Creatim.
Overlay plugins used to be synonymous with accessibility. All you had to do was install one, and voilà — all accessibility issues were solved at the drop of a hat. Our moment of revelation came a few years ago when one of our clients asked us to test the proposed user flows with a real person with a disability.
A regular tester would take about three hours to complete 16 assigned user flows. Tim, a visually impaired man, was invited to the testing group, but it was a different story. He was a seasoned, technically savvy online user used to battling inaccessible sites. Despite his arsenal of tactics for overcoming accessibility obstacles, completing only four out of sixteen scenarios took him seven hours. The average person with his level of impairment would need more time and accomplish less.
Watching Tim struggle left us feeling utterly embarrassed. We returned to the drawing board, committed to facilitating accessibility wherever possible. This became part of our agency’s DNA.
According to the World Health Organization, over a billion people worldwide live with various disabilities. To better grasp the scope of accessibility, it’s crucial to understand the range of disabilities that impact online interactions:
Accessible design benefits everyone, not just those with impairments. Everyone will benefit from well-structured, easy-to-read content and streamlined navigation. This article provides a high-level overview of accessibility and how to incorporate it into your workflow.
A destination’s website acts as a digital alter ego of the actual destination. While visitors gather information from various online sources, the website is the only place online where they can establish an emotional connection with the destination brand. If a site lacks accessibility, this impression can quickly extend to the actual location.
Imagine a family that loves travelling with their grandfather despite his walking impairment and limited vision due to glaucoma. He looks forward to the coming holidays but struggles with an inaccessible destination website. Is this how people with disabilities are treated in the location? Will he be confined to a hotel room for the entire week? Feeling bad about their reluctant grandfather not being able to share their excitement, the family decides to look for alternative holiday destinations.
Implementing a digital accessibility programme provides organisations with a structured approach to designing website experiences. It aligns content creators, editors, designers and developers around shared objectives. Here are several compelling reasons why your Destination Marketing Organisation (DMO) should prioritise a digital accessibility programme.
In a quick assessment of 50 European national tourism website homepages using the Accessible Web Helper tool, only the websites of Sweden, Switzerland, Georgia, Armenia and Slovenia achieved a perfect score of 100 out of 100 points. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom, Vatican City, France, the Czech Republic, Finland and Lithuania are making strides to catch up.
It is important to note that a software assessment score doesn’t give the whole picture. It can only indicate that the website has accessibility issues. However, our goal was not to provide in-depth accessibility audits, which could take a month or more for each site, but to rank the sites to get a high-level overview of the state of web accessibility in the industry. Since an algorithm conducted the assessment, the result bears a certain level of objectivity, although unrelated to actual WCAG compliance.
The top ten websites have clearly been designed with accessibility in mind, but even these sites may have areas for improvement.
Creating a truly accessible website starts with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), recognised worldwide as the standard for web accessibility. WCAG provides specific criteria and measures under three main levels of conformance:
The WCAG encourages designers, developers and content creators to use the POUR principles as a foundation for planning accessible solutions that should be:
It should be noted that WCAG guidelines are primarily technical. They should be amended with adequate marketing, content and editorial policies. There are no standards for these; they rely only on best practices.
Assistive technologies are specialised hardware and software designed to help individuals with disabilities perform tasks that may otherwise be difficult or impossible. Some examples include:
Many of the above-mentioned remedies, such as screen readers, text enlargement and keyboard navigation, are already integrated into modern browsers and mobile devices. However, most websites are not optimised to fully support these technologies, leading to inadequate experiences and frustrations. Therefore, it is crucial to create websites and apps that facilitate using both built-in technologies and external devices to enhance the online experience of people with disabilities.
Accessibility goes beyond technical modifications; it requires a shift in mindset throughout the organisation. When developing or enhancing digital experiences, all stakeholders should adopt accessibility as a fundamental design principle. Regular reviews and updates are essential to ensure compliance with the latest guidelines and regulations.
A standard mistake organisations make when implementing accessibility is to focus only on basic requirements or rely on overlay plugins while ignoring more complex issues. They often fail to involve users with different disabilities in the testing process. Such an approach inevitably results in inadequate solutions. Another significant mistake is insufficient employee training and disregarding accessibility as an ongoing process.
Implementing accessibility to existing websites can be challenging. It may require extensive code modifications, which can lead to significant effort. This situation is similar to the construction industry, where it may be more reasonable to tear down an old building and build a new replica rather than attempt to modernise the existing one. While making an existing site accessible can be demanding, designing a new site on accessibility principles may only require some 10% additional effort. It always takes more energy to tear down a wall than to erect one in the first place.
In this regard, a reasonable approach could be to postpone your efforts until a major website redesign. However, users and legislators expect you to act on the problem now, so what can you do? You can’t build an accessible website overnight, especially if the current one suffers serious accessibility issues. However, fixing at least some problems while informing your users about your upgrade plans can move the compliance needle and show your users that you care. For example, you can:
Example: ChatGPT described the image as “Five young men in stylish outfits stand together outdoors, smiling and posing on a bridge with greenery, buildings and a church tower in the background.” Of course, AI does not know who the people in the picture are. "Renowned Slovenian band Joker Out poses on a bridge in Ljubljana, smiling confidently with the city's greenery behind them” would be a much more meaningful description, but it must be manually edited to provide context. The alt-text shouldn’t be too long, as screen readers read them in one go, omitting punctuation, so long descriptions are difficult to understand. While there are no technical limits, it is wise to keep alt-texts under 150 characters.
Promptly providing at least some of the remedies listed above will show your audiences that you are serious about getting accessibility right.
While promptly addressing the most apparent, easy-to-fix issues may be reasonable, a more strategic approach is needed to comply with the WCAG standard. Here’s a step-by-step guide to creating an accessible website.
Initial assessment
Accessibility Audit
Testing
Implementation
Review
Certification
Training
Optimisation
Stakeholders will be consulted to determine objectives and develop the project’s roadmap. Consultants will then be consulted to assess the scope of the Accessibility Audit.
The in-depth analysis of the Accessibility Audit should provide practical guidelines for your design, development, testing and support efforts.
Only testing with real users can provide the whole picture of accessibility. Like any user testing, it is essential that users feel comfortable without any pressure. Usually, they give the most valuable insights when performing the tests on their home computers. This is even more true with individuals with disabilities. They typically use assistive devices, which are inconvenient to carry and use outside their familiar environment. To provide context, they must also be eloquent, actively commenting on their thoughts and feelings while trying to reach their test-defined goal. Their feedback is invaluable for understanding real-world accessibility challenges.
Accommodating blind individuals addresses most web accessibility issues, so they are the people to contact first when conducting accessibility testing. From a technical standpoint, their challenges are the most difficult to overcome. Typically, they require website structure modifications and HTML syntax rethinking to enable meaningful output from screen readers, which no overlay tool can provide.
Visually impaired individuals rely on a keyboard, which will also accommodate people with motor disabilities who can’t use a mouse. In general, a keyboard serves as a central connection point for most assistive devices. In addition to a keyboard, individuals with motor impairment can use voice command software. However, WCAG guidelines do not require voice command features.
Individuals with cognitive and hearing impairments have mostly content-related issues that don’t require significant technical modifications.
When conducting a website upgrade, it is essential to ensure accessibility of content for all users, which includes various functionalities such as:
How to Set Up a Card with Hover so that the screen reader reads the entire card content, not just the interactive element "More"
Several tools help developers and content creators design and review an accessible experience. Here is a checklist by Ashley Firth.
It is wise to allow a third-party expert to review whether induced adjustments meet the criteria outlined in the initial accessibility plan. This phase typically consists of several iterative cycles.
Provide training on accessibility best practices for designers, developers and content creators.
Accessibility isn’t a one-off task — it’s an ongoing commitment. Regularly audit your website, adapt to updated WCAG guidelines and continually gather user feedback.
Overlays refer to technologies designed to enhance website accessibility. They use third-party source code, typically JavaScript, to optimise the website's front-end code. They may adjust the page's contrast, enlarge the text size or enforce other modifications to enhance the experience for users with disabilities.
Accessibility overlay plugins such as AccessiBe, AudioEye or UserWay have grown in popularity recently. Mainly because they seem to provide a quick-fix shortcut compared to the strains of implementing a proper accessibility strategy, which inevitably requires manual work.
However, as the disability community points out, overlays may cause more harm than good in the long run. They do not address the page structure and navigational issues. They can’t provide context crucial for people with disabilities to complete online tasks. Moreover, overlay plugins may conflict with the built-in features and assistive devices that people with disabilities have already installed on their computers. Recently, overlay technology has raised considerable privacy and security concerns.
Organisations that rely on overlays are increasingly perceived as trying to sweep the problem under the rug. The exception is a “Temporary bandage solution” that uses overlay technology to provide at least basic accessibility features while the organisation works on a long-term solution. It is essential to inform your users upfront about such plans.
In general, people with disabilities like to decide how to use assistive technologies by themselves, so “overlays” just get in their way.
The Slovenian Tourism Organisation (STO) aims to set a standard for online accessibility. Recently, it decided to upgrade the national portal slovenia.info to comply with WCAG guidelines. The portal contains tens of thousands of pages in seven languages, so the project posed a substantial challenge.
They entrusted Creatim with conducting the accessibility audit and technical implementation, while their internal team concentrated on editorial policy adjustments and content upgrades.
Creatim started with educational workshops and project planning early last year, followed by an accessibility audit and upgrade implementation in the second half of the year. Since the WCAG criteria pertain mainly to technical adjustments, slovenia.info is now deemed compliant with WCAG standards and, by extension, with EU legislation.
But the actual heavy lifting lies with the editors.
Although the WCAG guidelines do not specifically mention editorial policy, it is essential to creating an accessible user experience. Therefore, STO editors had to manually review and improve a considerable amount of content and images. While much of the content and alt-texts already existed, they required enhancement to ensure clarity and context. This review process is expected to continue until the end of this year.
At Creatim, we believe the Internet is not about technology. It is about people. Hence, providing equal access to information for all is a pivotal element of our mission. We create digital solutions that meet the highest accessibility standards. We offer various accessibility-related services, such as auditing, planning, UX, usability testing and technical implementation. We work with users with disabilities and seek innovative approaches to designing accessible digital solutions.
With over twenty years of experience, we’ve helped organisations transform their online presence and deliver meaningful results. We’re proud to partner with DMOs and forward-thinking tourism businesses that share our mission to create a more inclusive digital world.
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