5 Ways to Improve Your Website's Accessibility
As a website owner, you may be thinking about getting as many visits to your site as possible. Others however, take the required efforts to guarantee that their website can be accessible to all users. There are millions of people that rely on websites to be accessible, and if you do not take the attempt to learn about your users’ needs, some of them might struggle. For example, have you ever considered how a blind person, who relies on a screen reader, would interact with your website?
Fortunately, implementing web accessibility is not that difficult. You just need to be aware of the underlying issues that might make a website difficult or impossible to search through for some people. And once you have that information, you can take all the measures needed to avoid such blunders and create an ultimately user-friendly site for your audience.
What is Web Accessibility?
Everyone should, in theory, be able to access any website on the internet. It should not matter if they have a medical condition that limits their capacities or what network infrastructure they require. This is a core principle of the idea of web accessibility.
Millions of internet users have particular needs, impairments, or disabilities that can make some types of websites difficult, if not impossible, for them to navigate through. When you are mindful of the different challenges people may encounter when visiting your site, you can design your website to be more accessible and inclusive to your audience's needs.
While there are other conditions and disabilities that might impact how individuals use websites, these are a few of the more frequent types of impairments:
Visual Impairment: This refers to the inability to perceive or see color contrasts on a partial or entire basis.
Hearing Disability: Refers to users who have a partial or complete hearing loss.
Motor Skills/Physical Impairment: Users who may have difficulties in moving parts of their body, especially when making precise motions.
Photo-sensitivity: Epilepsy and other neurological disorders can induce seizures that are triggered by bright flashing lights.
Cognitive Disorders: Dementia and dyslexia are two examples that impact cognitive capacity.
Many individuals utilize assistive technology to navigate the internet and work past these issues. Screen readers that can actively read content on different web pages, voice recognition software that can transform text into speech, Braille terminals, and even alternate keyboards that can accommodate special requirements are all examples of such.
Things to Keep in Mind to Achieve Website Accessibility
Having a Keyboard-Friendly Site
This is another essential step. Simply put: a website must function without the usage of a mouse in order to be accessible. This is due to the fact that many assistive devices rely solely on keyboard navigation. As a result, all of your site’s primary functions must be accessible simply through the use of a keyboard. This covers all pages, content, and links, among other things.
The Tab key is the most popular way to navigate using a keyboard. This will help switch between different sections on a page that can be focused with the keyboard, such as buttons, forms, and links. Your main objective is to make sure that the Tab key can access all online content and navigation throughout your website.
It is easy to test this out by simply visiting your own website without using a mouse. You can detect and solve issues such as being unable to access certain parts of your site or if you are having difficulty navigating.
Choosing the Right Colors and Contrasts
Color-blindness is frequently discussed as if it were a black-and-white issue. However, because various individuals see colors in different ways, it is more of a spectrum. With this, you must ensure that the colors you choose for your website contrast effectively in order for your users to be able to discern the various components of your page.
The most important things are to make sure that all of the text is visible against a dark backdrop. Set a dark color against brighter ones, and make sure that they do not bleed into one another.
Create Accessible Forms
Forms are a helpful feature to most websites, but they must be properly constructed. The most essential thing is to make sure each field is properly labeled. It is also a good idea to put labels next to relevant fields. While a sighted person may easily identify a label to the relevant field or choice, a screen reader user may not be able to do so.
Try to make an effort to offer information and instructions in a clear and understandable manner.
Easily Accessible Content
You must be sure that all the content on your web page is accessible. While this is typically not a problem, when a page has dynamic content, it may be.
In a nutshell, content is dynamic if it can change without refreshing the page it is on. If the site does not notify assistive tools of the change, this might become an issue for some users. Many screen readers, for instance, will only read the site as it appears when it initially loads. As a result, you must be updated whenever something changes, or else the user may miss any new content.
Adding Re-sizable Text
Users with visual impairments can benefit from the ability to resize the text on most browsers and devices. Resizing text, on the other hand, might disrupt your design or make it impossible to engage with your site if you do not construct your site to support this functionality.
Avoiding absolute units, such as setting font sizes in pixels, is a recommended practice. Also, utilize relative sizes, which can allow the text to scale according to the rest of the page and the size of the screen.
Do not disable user scalability as it makes it harder for users to scale texts. Increasing the zoom levels on your browser and testing font sizes can also be a good practice to achieve this requirement.
Our Conclusion
It should be a major concern for you to ensure that your website is accessible to as many individuals as possible. There is no need to exclude anyone, especially when it is so simple to avoid it. Not only will users appreciate it, but you will most likely notice improved conversions and better traffic to your website as well.
Be sure that your site is optimized for accessibility now by taking the time to identify the potential faults in your content and design.
DISCLAIMER
Our blog posts at Luminescent Dreams are meant purely for educational discussion of legal product and service design. It contains only general information about legal matters. It is not legal advice and should not be treated as such.
