The purpose of a website is to reach as many people as possible to get your message across. With 25% of adults in the U.S. experiencing a disability, be it auditory, visual, physical, or cognitive, that goal is only achieved when all of us make an effort to improve accessibility of our sites.
Web accessibility is about designing and developing sites, tools, and technologies that can be enjoyed by 100% of internet users, so the suggestions we make here will not only improve your site’s accessibility for those with disabilities but will also make visiting the site more enjoyable to all users. If you make an effort to apply them, you can increase your reach, improve user experience, express your commitment to inclusivity, and avoid legal snags.
As you optimize your website to improve accessibility, seek the counsel of those who live with disabilities to test your site. This can accurately inform your changes and improve overall user experience.
Make Your URLs Descriptions Descriptive
Before users even get to your website, they have to find it. Many users with visual impairments rely on screen readers to read out which sites have the answers to their questions or the products they are looking for. You can help your site to rank better by giving your content more descriptive URLs.
For example, https://www.performancedrivenmarketing.com/4-ways-to-spot-great-web-design/ is a more descriptive URL than https://www.performancedrivenmarketing.com/web-design/
Organize Your Content
No one wants to read an article that is full of big blocks of wordy text. This is the age of quick information retrieval, and the human attention span is shrinking to mirror the speed of search engines. You can improve accessibility and generally make your site easier to digest by keeping paragraphs and pages succinct.
Use clear section headings to help users find the information they are looking for readily. It is also usually a good idea to leave off industry-specific jargon or colloquialisms if you are writing general web content. Keep the language simple and easily digestible.
Enable Adjustable Font Sizing
While large font sizes tend to clutter a site, some users need them to access the information presented. The solution to this dichotomy is to add a text-resizing tool that allows users to choose for themselves just how large text is displayed on their screens. In addition to this method to improve accessibility, make sure your website works at different browser zoom levels.
Optimize Contrast on the Page
The contrast between elements on your page enables users to receive the information you put out. This is why it is important to incorporate foreground and background elements with high contrast. Avoid using thin fonts or coding features such as JavaScript or CSS that prevent visually impaired users from increasing contrast levels.
Be mindful of the color palettes you employ. Black text on a white background offers the best contrast for those who suffer from visual impairments involving low color contrast sensitivity, conditions such as cataract, glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, and retinitis pigmentosa. Avoid using combinations of red and green, which are indistinguishable for colorblind users.
Steer clear of bright colors that are too intense for those with high photosensitivity. It is also unwise to make the most important elements in your site too heavily color reliant. These principles apply to images as well as to text.
Incorporate Alt Text with Your Images
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but only if they can be clearly viewed. Digital elements like images prove problematic to users who have vision-based disabilities. Screen readers and online Braille readers help such users access text by using synthesizers or Braille displays. Unfortunately, these resources can do very little to elucidate online images.
The Alt Text option for your website’s images is an excellent tool to improve image accessibility. Synthesized readers can pick up the descriptions included there as ordinary text. This ability makes it important for content creators to make their alt text as descriptive as possible to give visually impaired users the full experience. The “Longdesc Tag” function is even better for lengthy descriptions. Use tables appropriately.
Improve Accessibility of Video and Audio
If images are a challenge for visually-impaired users, video and audio content prove to be such for the hard of hearing. You can improve accessibility of video and audio in two ways: transcripts and closed captioning.
A transcript captures all the audio of a media file into text description while closed captions appear on a video as it plays. Closed captioning can include things other than true speech, such as descriptions of laughter or sighs and scoffs. Be mindful of the contrast between text and the video behind, and remember that auto-generated closed captions are not always accurate. Add your own to properly convey your message.
To make your site accessible to those with visual impairments, consider adding audio descriptions as companions to videos. These shouldn’t be overly long, but they can be helpful in conveying gestures, visual aids, and changes in setting to those who cannot see them.
Utilize Keyboard Navigation
Navigating with a mouse is not a viable option for those who cannot see. These users rely on keyboard shortcuts to navigate websites. In order to improve accessibility, all interactive elements of your site (drop-down menus, forms, dialog boxes, widgets, URLs, etc.) should be accessible via the keyboard.
Anchor text or buttons like “Click Here” or “Read More are unhelpfully undescriptive and should be avoided. However, directional cues are helpful additions for those with cognitive impairments, new internet users, and those who are not very tech savvy. To further improve clickless navigation, enable text-to-speech navigation.
