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Value and prioritization of large-scale things a web site can do for improved accessibility

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From: Dave Merrill
Date: Apr 17, 2013 9:55AM

Hi folks, first post, hope it's not unwelcome-ly long or obvious. By way of
intro, I'm a developer at a web software company, not an accessibility
expert. I've recently gotten interested in accessibility, and if there are
things we can do to improve access, without a lot of complexity either for
us to build or for our users to user, I may be able to get some of that in.

By "large-scale", I mean page structure changes that can be done on the
site's main templates, rather than hand-tweaked changes to each page. For
example, the one step of applying ARIA landmark roles is in reach for many
sites, just by updating their blog or content management software
templates. Doing the whole nine yards to annotate every widgetÂ’s
interaction state is much harder, unless the underlying platform already
does it.

Here are some possible steps a site could take, that are all relatively
low-hanging fruit:

- Place all content within HTML5 semantic container tags, specifically
article, aside ,nav, section, figure, figcaption, footer, header, and main
- Assign ARIA landmark roles to content containers and HTML headings
- Assign aria-label, aria-labelledby and aria-describedby attributes to
appropriate content containers
- Set the title attribute on links
- Set the title attribute for content containers (less desirable, since
it's seen by all, and containers aren't typically labelled this way)

Which of those would you say are worth doing? Taken together, would they
make a real difference in accessibility? Are there other simple things that
could be done, ideally the page template level, rather than specific hand
tweaks for every page?

(I'm specifically not talking about forms or interactivity, that's a whole
other topic. I'm also not talking about making sure HTML and image colors
have good contrast, not because it's unimportant, but because it has to be
done on a case-by-case basic, rather than in global templates.)

Thanks in advance for any thoughts,

Dave Merrill