When designing or building an online presence for your business, it’s important to know how to make the website accessible. Making your site more accessible will increase your reach with your customers, ensuring that anyone with accessibility issues can still view your site the way you want them to.
It also improves your search engine optimization, as Google can rank your site higher in search results thanks to accessibility features.
Accessible forms
Most of us really don’t like formality. However, they are often necessary and accessible to everyone to reduce bounce rates and increase engagement!
If you think that you need help with all these things, there are professionals who can help you with the requirements for web accessibility and simplify your process.
When you make your website accessible, users with visual, motor, or cognitive impairments can interact with it. There are a few things you can do to make your form more accessible: give your form elements nice labels, give clear instructions, and provide helpful form validation and accurate error messages.
Color
One of the biggest issues for many users is color and contrast. Some visual defects can cause low sensitivity to color contrast, making it difficult to see foreground and background colors after they are poorly designed. For example, yellow or white text on a black background.
Make sure that your website is always designed in a way that is visually clear. This includes avoiding thin fonts or difficult color combinations. You should also consider color-blind users and adjust your site accordingly.
Use headings correctly throughout your article
If your business website contains a lot of text, it’s important to use the correct header to organize the site’s organization. Screen readers for visually impaired users use a heading structure to navigate content.
Be sure to use tags only for the main page title and avoid skipping the header level when traversing the document.
Alt text for images
When uploading an image, it may seem inconvenient to describe it with an alt text tag, but this is important for screen readers.
The alt tag should only be used to describe what the image shows, and it should never be used to add information to an existing article. A clear description ensures visually impaired users can still appreciate what the picture shows.
Allow keyboard navigation
Blind or visually impaired users cannot use a mouse to navigate your site and will often use a braille keyboard to navigate. Don’t make navigation a challenge for users with vision difficulties. Instead, make sure you’ve integrated keyboard navigation into your site.
This means that users can only access key elements of your site from the keyboard, including menu items, anchor text, form fields, widgets, CTAs, and other buttons and dialog boxes.
Basically, users don’t need a mouse to access these elements of your website. So how can you be sure? First, use a website builder with built-in accessibility features.
To do this, you should check its documentation to see if it supports creating fully keyboard-navigable web pages. Also, when using a third-party extension or plugin, such as a form builder extension, make sure that the plugin developer has considered accessibility.
Make multimedia accessible
Video, audio, and other multimedia elements are essential to delivering a high level of user experience and driving engagement on your website.
However different users may have different needs, depending on their disability. For example, visually impaired people cannot read text or view images, but they can hear sounds. Clearly, hearing-impaired users can watch the video but hear no sound from it.
With that in mind, it’s best to provide as many ways as possible for your visitors to understand your content. This includes writing video and audio recordings to embed your media or allow users to listen to the text instead of reading it.
Properly structured content
Semantic HTML elements are like little road signs and landmarks as you pass a new place. They help you orient yourself. These include tags like main, post, section, header, and footer.
Semantic HTML provides purpose and context to your content while improving user experience and readability. It also improves your SEO by providing clear structure and meaningful content. So when organizing your website, make the most of semantic HTML. Use ARIA landmarks and roles to create “anchor points” that make it easy for users to navigate through different sections.
Providing jump links allows users to skip repetitive browsing and jump straight to the content. Also, choose descriptive link text instead of the generic “click here” so users know where they are going!
Millions of people around the world need to be able to access the web. If you don’t make an effort to optimize your site to meet their needs, you could become part of the problem.
Today, building a website is not so difficult, and as mentioned above, making your website accessible doesn’t have to be that difficult either. You have a lot of tips and tools, so don’t hesitate to implement them!
