How to make your church website accessible

What does it mean to make your church website accessible? It means your church website can be browsed and understood by people who are blind, who have poor vision, who are hard of hearing or deaf, who are colorblind, who are handicapped, who are learning impaired, etc. Why should you care whether such people can browse your site or not? Because they matter to God, too.

In the late 1990s, the U.S. government passed a law known as Section 508. The law really was just an extension of previous legislation requiring, for example, that buildings be accessible to handicapped people. Section 508 required all branches of the federal government — and any company that wanted to do work for the federal government — to ensure that their informational technologies (of which websites are an important example) be accessible by everyone starting in June 2001. So Section 508 compliance became a hot issue in the web development world. It still is.

To be sure, most companies and organizations, including churches, are not legally bound to comply with Section 508 requirements. But it makes good sense to do so, especially, I think, for churches. That's because churches should be concerned about the salvation and spiritual growth of all people. Currently (November 2004), even though this is not a church website, I'm making changes to this site to ensure it is accessible, as much as possible. I will be listing below some steps you can take to help ensure your church website is accessible, with examples from my own site. Check back often because I'll be adding to the list regularly over the next few months as I make changes to Great Church Websites.

There are some principles of website accessibility that are likely impractical for most church webmasters to comply with, given that the vast majority of them are volunteers. For example, many churches post RealAudio or MP3 files of their pastor's sermons online. I applaud that. However, deaf people obviously are not able to listen to audio files of sermons. Accessibility guidelines require that text equivalents for audio and video files be made available in synch with the audio, so deaf people can understand their content. This can be done through SMIL™ (pronounced "smile"), that is, Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language; through the use of Macromedia Flash; and through other means.

Creating synchronized text equivalents for audio files of sermons would be incredibly time-consuming. So for most churches, doing so would be impractical. But later I will post some information about this and other "advanced" accessibility issues, in the hope that some church webmasters will lead the way in addressing these issues. I also will be posting an example file or files.

For now, however, I just want to list basic steps you can take to make your church website accessible. For more information, check out the "more resources" pages of this site (see links at left) for various articles, webpages and entire sites devoted to the issues of accessibility.

But first, a quick summary of accessibility technology: Blind people browse the internet with the help of a screen reader, perhaps the most popular of which is JAWS™ for Windows from Freedom Scientific. This is software that reads aloud the text of a webpage at a very fast rate — up to 400 words a minute or more. (But screen readers can't read text that's actually a graphic — a critical point.) Visually impaired people use screen magnifiers — such as Lunar™ Screen Magnifier by Dolphin Computer Access, ZoomText by Ai Squared or MAGic by the aforementioned Freedom Scientific — to enlarge what's on the screen. Deaf people obviously need to see your web content — they can't hear your downloadable MP3s of sermons, for example. As stated above, you need to provide for deaf people textual equivalents for any audio content on your church website. Finally, severely handicapped people must rely on tabbing through a website and hitting the Enter key to follow links. (Try it some time. In some circumstances, it can actually save time.)

My wife and I have a dear friend named Michael who's blind. After completing changes to this site to make it accessible, I plan to ask Michael to review the site (using his screen reader) and grade my efforts. He's very passionate about the subject, as you might imagine.

My goal, however, is for this website to be "Bobby"-approved. Who's Bobby? Actually, Bobby isn't a person. To be Bobby-approved means your site is certifiably Section 508-compliant. (I don't know the history of the term "Bobby" itself.) Congratulations to River of Life Community Church of Round Rock, Texas. I think this is the first church website I've reviewed (of the 14,000 church websites I've reviewed to date) that's Bobby-approved. For more information about being Bobby-approved, or to have your webpages tested for free online, click here.