Your website will be judged by a lot of criteria – it’s inevitable. Website visitors will consider whether they like brand colors, appearance, copywriting. Potential clients weigh in on how authoritative your business, product or team is. But what is an important criterion that businesses often overlook? Website accessibility.In fact, on average there are 51 Accessibility errors on the home pages of the top 1 million websites.
Website accessibility is essential for any business to reach its full target audience. That’s why today, we’re going through everything you need to do to get started. Here we will introduce:
- What is website accessibility and why it matters
- Eight Website Accessibility Best Practices You Need to Know
- Three website accessibility tools to help you stay compliant
let’s start.
What is website accessibility?
Website accessibility is the practice of building and maintaining your website in a way that people of all abilities can access and understand information. This means making sure anyone blocking videos, using a screen reader, or viewing your site can access and understand the information on your site.
According to the latest Website Accessibility Content Guidelinesa website content is accessible if it is perceptible, actionable, understandable, and robust.
What does it mean:
- Perceived: Information must be communicated to users in a way that they can perceive (all their senses cannot see the information).
- Actionable: The UI and navigation of a website must work the way users do it.
- Understandable: The UI and operation of the website needs to be understood by the user.
- powerful: All website content needs to be robust enough to be interpreted accurately by users, whether or not they use assistive technology.
Website accessibility includes your website, and any tools, dashboards, databases or other technologies on your website. These should all be developed with the same goal of conveying information to people of all abilities.For this article, we will focus on your web pages, including your home page, your About us pageyour blog post, your login page, and more. It’s important that you do it right – let’s see why.
Why is website accessibility critical?
Website accessibility is critical to all businesses so that everyone using the Internet can access and understand the information on your website. Because if your website is inaccessible, you risk missing out on potential customers, alienating your audience, and even facing legal action. Websites of government offices or private companies with 15 or more employees must be ADA compliant.And there is precedent Lawsuits against inaccessible online content.
While compliance is a big reason to make accessibility a priority when you create a website or embark on a redesign, it’s far from the only one.according to WHOmore than 1 billion people worldwide have some kind of disability.
You might think that if your site is simple, this won’t affect you.But even the most Basic website Inaccessible for completely preventable reasons. In fact, 5.3% Accessibility errors were detected for all home page elements of . That’s the page element – not just the page. Clearly, website accessibility needs to be a priority.
you want Make sure your content is inclusive As much as possible, this takes time, energy and focus. It’s not intimidating, but it’s important, so you need a plan. Now let’s talk about website accessibility best practices you need to know.
Website accessibility standards you need to know
Maintaining an accessible website requires attention to all elements of website design, including media content, website architecture, font, etc. This can be overwhelming, but it’s essential, so start with the most important best practices. Here are the key website accessibility standards that everyone who works on their website (business owners and marketers) needs to know.
1. Choose the right CMS
This is the first website accessibility best practice because it’s the most basic. You need a content management system (CMS) that supports all users and helps you create website development and maintenance processes that are both efficient and easy to manage. This is especially true if you’re a small business that’s pressed for time and doesn’t have a networking team.
WordPress Has powerful website accessibility features that are easy to use once you get the hang of it. drupa is another ideal option, but this may require the help of a web developer.Website builders like wax and square space There may be limitations in keeping your site accessible – be sure to double check before submitting, or work with a web design agency to make a site that follows all the latest guidelines.
2. Use alt text everywhere
Alternative text is critical to website accessibility. The text that usually prompts you to add all images to your CMS is enclosed in HTML elements, which is what screen readers use to translate your images for people who can’t see the graphics of your web page.
Take Kristen McCormick’s post for example emotional copywriting words:
Images are a wheel that expands feelings and emotions, helping you to provide more options for your marketing copy. That’s exactly what the alt text says, so anyone reading the post with a screen reader knows what’s visible on the screen.
It should be noted that alt text is also an important part of our On-Page SEO Checklistbecause that’s how Google “sees” the images on your page.
3. Avoid using only colors or images to convey information
To make your website content accessible to users of varying abilities, including those with assistive technology, you need to avoid anywhere on your website that conveys information only through color or images. This will not be understandable for all your users.
take Lead Capture Form, E.g. You can’t just use a red box to alert the user to an incorrect input. People who are colorblind cannot spot differences and cannot access information. In addition to this color-based prompt, add a text description.
4. Arrange titles in order
Headings are important for arranging information blog post, as they convey the importance of that section to the entire post and the importance of moving to a new section.These signals help convey the logical structure of your post, which is why you can work on headlines in your branding fashion guide.
But headings aren’t just text size or shape, they’re an HTML element. This means they can also communicate the importance of the structure and sections of the post to anyone using a screen reader. This makes it even more important to keep them organized. So remember to always do it sequentially, never jump to H4 after H2, and use the same type of heading to document comparable parts of the content.
You can also find in our On-Page SEO Checklist.
5. Use easy-to-read fonts
Another related tip: choose fonts that are easy to read. From an accessibility standpoint, this speaks for itself.but there is also a Marketing Psychology aspect. According to the cognitive fluency effect, the harder something is to read, the less credible it is. Also, if the text describes an instruction, the task is considered to be more difficult.
6. Keep all navigation keyboard friendly
Your website navigation should be accessible to anyone – you want your visitors to be able to interact with your content, view your product pages, sign up for your communication, and more. To make your website inclusive, you need to ensure that users can navigate using the keyboard.
Keyboard users typically use the Tab key to move throughout the site. Successfully moving an entire site with this key requires testing and some code setup. Keep website accessibility in mind There is a good guide to start checking your website. Also, we’ll share more tools to check your general accessibility in the next section.
related: 16 Ways to Make Your Social Media Accessible and Inclusive
7. Make sure the color contrasts
Remember that your website design should also be accessible. A very common problem is color contrast. 86.4% ‘s homepage has low-contrast text, below the WCAG 2 AA threshold, making it the most common site accessibility failure.
The colors on your website, especially the text and its background, need to be sufficiently contrasting so that it can be easily read by anyone, regardless of whether they have a vision impairment or not.
8. Make information easy to understand in multiple formats
This is the basis of website accessibility: You need to create content on your website and know that not everyone will be viewing and scrolling to access and understand the information. If you keep this in mind, you’ll remember to add alt text and keyboard navigation, and you’ll know that you need to convey information in text, graphics, code, etc. instead of relying on a single source, such as a video or gif.
Website Accessibility Tools
The website accessibility standard here is a good foundation – but it doesn’t really help unless you apply it to your website.Here are some simple to use website rater Elements or items that need fixing can be identified to make your website inclusive for all potential clients.
1. Sort sites
Sort sites is a fast, free tool that scans your entire website, letting you know of any errors and providing some context. For each error category, you’ll get a benchmark so you can see how your site compares to the average.
2. Accessibility Checker
This website scorer is concise and clear, and the results are clearly communicated in the report. It provides a score, a list of questions, and what needs to happen to correct it.
Sample report from a website that needs some work.
3. Website Accessibility Checker Chrome Extension
I love Chrome extensions. CSS Peep Helps me evaluate or check brand colors and fonts when needed, I find it saves me a lot of time I would otherwise spend guessing or referencing brand guidelines. This Website Accessibility Checker provides a quick way to scan any page you’re on and get immediate results – an excellent tool for anyone dedicated to keeping their website up to date.
On the other hand, since many accessibility optimizations overlap with SEO optimizations, you can use our Free Website Rater Check for missing alt text, title tags, and other elements.
Prioritize website accessibility for your business
You want to make sure your business and marketing reach your audience – and in order to do that, you need to prioritize website accessibility. Use these free tools to start identifying areas you need to improve, then ensure your compliance and inclusion with the website accessibility best practices above.
To recap, here is your website accessibility checklist:
- Choose the right CMS
- Use alt text everywhere
- Avoid using only colors or images to convey information
- Sort titles in order
- Use easy-to-read fonts
- Keep all navigation keyboard friendly
- Ensure color contrast
- Make information easy to understand in multiple formats
Good luck!
