Introduction
There is an increasing emphasis on making services and products sustainable and driving business processes to ensure they are taking sustainability into account. Whether you’re a developer, agency owner or are involved in the development of websites we can all play our part in being more sustainable as a community by helping to build sustainable websites.
Typically when people think about sustainability, they think about the environment and making sure that they are being more "eco-friendly" or "green". However, sustainability focuses on more generally: "fulfilling the needs of current generations without compromising the needs of future generations, while ensuring a balance between economic growth, environmental care and social well being"
There are therefore multiple different areas that contribute towards being sustainable, best described using the 4 pillars of sustainability:
- Human
- Economic
- Social
- Environmental
Human
The Human pillar focuses on improving and maintaining human capital by being a member of society and focusing on people both directly or indirectly involved or affected by the products or services we deliver.
Key areas to focus on:
- Accessibility
- Ease of content-editing
- Usability and User Experience
- Resources
- Training & Learning Opportunities
Accessibility
By building a website that can be accessed by all, not only are we able to share the content with a larger audience, we’re also creating an inclusive website so all users can use this despite any disabilities that may limit their internet use.
This is commonly overlooked by most developers and agencies, so below are some quick wins that can be implemented into your next Umbraco solution to improve the accessibility.
When building websites, it should be common practice to run a web accessibility tool such as the WAVE tool or WEBAIM tool against each page. This will check through the page to check for common accessibility faults, and give solutions to resolve these. Google Lighthouse also gives an accessibility score for website pages, however this report is not as detailed as some of the other accessibility tools.
Read the full article at 24days.in
