Making CHIP Accessible: Our Journey to Inclusive Digital Experiences

Accessibility is much more than a legal obligation-it’s an opportunity to make digital content truly usable for everyone. At CHIP, we see accessible design as a way to break down barriers and create a better experience for all users. Inspired by a free audit from an external service provider at the start of 2024, we began to take a closer look at the real-world obstacles on our site. This process quickly showed us that accessibility improvements benefit everyone, not just a select few. That’s why our goal for CHIP.de is to achieve at least level AA of the WCAG standard and to keep improving our website for all our visitors

Where We Started:

Our accessibility journey began with uncertainty. Would the new accessibility law apply to us at all? However, it quickly became clear that this was not our motivation and that we should be doing all the recommended changes anyway. We saw the value in investing early and aligning ourselves with the evolving WCAG Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which are set to become the standard. An additional motivation was that CHIP's loyal audience is ageing like everyone else, so good readability and usability are essential for all CHIP Users.

Our first audit revealed more issues than expected:

Keyboard Navigation:

Our navigation wasn't accessible via the keyboard. All this meant that CHIP couldn't be navigated on a smart TV or with a game controller. Fixing this was our first big success. As the navigation was of course part of every single page on CHIP.de, it had a huge impact overall. We took the next step:

Brand Colors and Contrast:

We discovered that CHIP’s signature brand color red did not always meet recommended contrast standards on certain backgrounds. Although we had already begun focusing on user experience years ago, it was still surprising to encounter this issue. Fortunately, the solution was straightforward: by slightly adjusting the shade of our red, we achieved the required contrast. While changing a brand color can be challenging, open communication and collaboration made it possible. Most users didn’t even notice the change, but it was a meaningful improvement for accessibility. We did the same for the ad labelling. Many publishers use light grey, tiny text for this purpose. We changed this to meet AA standards and make the labels readable for our users. Negative results are feared by you? We can say we haven't seen any impact on ad performance so far.

Accessibility touches every part of our process:

We see that having good accessibility is not only about improving code quality or design; it is also important to have an understanding from an editorial perspective.

A good example of this are the image alt texts.

We are training our editorial team to write meaningful alternative text for images, describing what is visible and relevant. This helps users with screen readers to understand our content. We discovered that some few articles contained comparison tables that were shared as images, which made them unreadable for screen readers. We therefore had to rebuild those tables as interactive, accessible web widgets.

We also discussed the HTML structure of our articles. As you probably know, a good structure is essential for accessibility and SEO. We engaged in lively debates about HTML5 specifications, headline hierarchies, and the way in which screen readers interpret title tags. Finding the best compromise is an ongoing task.

An ongoing process

Although automated tools like Google Lighthouse and the Chrome Ax plugin help us to identify many issues, they do not catch everything. For example, ensuring good keyboard navigation still requires manual testing.

We also know that there are things we can still improve. Accessibility is an ongoing process, not a one-time achievement, and we welcome feedback from users as sometimes small barriers go unnoticed unless someone points them out.

Conclusion

Accessibility is an ongoing journey, not a final destination. Every improvement we make helps more people enjoy CHIP. If you notice any issues, please let us know through our contact form - your feedback helps us get better. I’d also like to thank my colleagues, my team, and especially the UX team for making these improvements possible.