Everything you need to know to ensure that your website is accessible and compliant with GetAccessible

In this guide, we’ll take you step-by-step to ensure that you get the most out of GetAccessible’s capabilities and that your website’s accessibility is performing at the highest level.

Installing GetAccessible

Let’s begin by making sure that GetAccessible is installed correctly on your website. To function optimally, you should copy and paste the installation code into your website’s source code.

If you’ve used GetAccessible’s installation code, then it is important to make sure that GetAccessible is installed directly within the body tag of your HTML (it doesn’t matter whether it’s in the opening or closing of the tag). You can also install GetAccessible within your head tag, though within the body is more recommended.

Please note: do not load GetAccessible in a separate JS file (but directly within your source code), do not wrap GetAccessible’s script with custom logic like load delays or otherwise, and do not add any custom CSS or JS to override any of GetAccessible’s functions.

Lastly, as part of GetAccessible’s process, it’ll send bots to your website to perform its scanning and analysis. We have servers worldwide, which means that if you block specific geolocations or use firewalls to disallow bots to reach your website, you may be blocking GetAccessible processes. Some of the bots and servers can be whitelisted, others cannot. If you use geoblocking, please take this into consideration. If you need assistance with whitelisting GetAccessible, please reach out to our support team directly.

Testing GetAccessible

Now the fun part begins! After we’ve made sure that GetAccessible is correctly installed, it’s time to test your website and ensure that the integration went smoothly and that GetAccessible runs as it should on your website. 

The reason you would want to test the integration is that, as great and as comprehensive as the AI is, it can still miss a few things here and there. Like all software, bugs are rare but may still exist, and if they do, we’d want to catch and address them promptly.

First and foremost – we need to make sure that GetAccessible loads properly to your website.

For thorough testing, we’ve prepared a dedicated guide to take you through all the necessary steps, from start to finish, to test your website thoroughly. The testing guide is written for non-technical people, and it covers keyboard navigation, screen-reader adjustments, UI and design-related adjustments, and automated testing and monitoring.

Visit our guide: DIY: the full guide to testing your website’s accessibility, WCAG, and ADA compliance level

Of course, if you have any questions, or if you’ve found any issues, don’t hesitate to reach out to our support team for help!

GetAccessible’s best practices and general accessibility recommendations

In the following section, we’ll provide you with some best practices for integrating GetAccessible and recommendations to help you achieve the highest accessibility level.

Ensuring Image descriptions are accurate.

Image descriptions, also known as alt text (or an HTML alt attribute), are used by screen readers to describe an image’s contents to a blind user. As you probably already know, GetAccessible uses AI to provide such descriptions for images that weren’t manually added by the website owner.

The way it works is simple: the AI (computer vision) engine creates an alt text from the objects that appear in the image and the embedded text. For example, an image of people playing with a ball on the beach with the text “50% off beachwear” will receive an alt text like: “50% off beachwear. People playing football on the beach during daytime”.

AI is a great way to describe an image for a blind person but as good as AI is, it doesn’t always have the context people have. For example, those people on the beach may be famous football players like Messi and Ronaldo who advertise a specific sale. An AI will know that people are there, but it will not know who they are or their names, which is sometimes an important piece of information to convey to the user. 

Although GetAccessible’s AI descriptions are indeed accessible and compliant, to ensure the best possible user experience, we recommend providing your own alt texts that comprehensively describe an image, including the objects, people, names, and texts within it, and rely on GetAccessible’s AI as a fallback method.

Ensuring manual accessibility work doesn’t override GetAccessible’s

As a policy, GetAccessible honors manual accessibility work that is implemented and doesn’t override it because it takes into consideration that if you’ve expressly and explicitly implemented accessibility adjustments, you would want it to remain intact. 

This enables website owners and coders to incorporate accessibility in more ways than one. Websites can implement manual work as complementary to GetAccessible or the opposite, depending on their knowledge, skills, and budgets.

Therefore, if you’ve implemented manual accessibility adjustments without a proper understanding of how web accessibility works, and your manual work is incorrect, it won’t always be overridden by GetAccessible (it will override it in some cases, but mostly it won’t). 

We fully support and are happy if our customers participate in the accessibility process. Keep in mind to make sure that you know what you are doing, and we are always glad to help guide you if you are not sure.

Reporting and resolving accessibility issues

In case you, your development team, or even a user have found an accessibility issue, we’d love to learn about it promptly so we can look into it, understand its reasons, and solve it. Our customer service and technical support teams are your best point of contact to report any such issue, and you can do that by emailing support@smallscreenproducer.com. Please make sure that your email includes the following pieces of information:

  1. A direct link to the page where the issue occurs.
  2. Step-by-step instructions to reproduce the issue on that page.
  3. The assistive technology used (JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver, etc.) or none.

Going beyond automation

As you know, GetAccessible is the most comprehensive web accessibility solution. Your website may include elements that are not a part of your website’s source code. Therefore, GetAccessible does not automate its remediation yet and requires an additional service. Please reach out to our customer service if you have one of the following so we can provide you with a separate quote:

  • PDF, PPT, or Excel files remediation
  • Video and audio remediation (those require closed captions and or audio descriptions and or transcripts)
  • If your organization requires a VPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template)

Other than that, GetAccessible provides services you may want to consider, such as comprehensive accessibility audits, accessibility inspections, consultancy, and more. If you are interested in any of these services, please let us know.