Most of our daily lives are centered around the internet and this is something we can’t deny. How are you doing your shopping and finding any essential information you need? It’s all through the internet of course.
Therefore, to keep an edge over your competitors, you need to make your website accessible enough to have a stunning experience. Let’s not forget that only in the US, nearly 60% of people live with a disability and web accessibility matters a lot.
We came up with several ideas to help you make your site more accessible and provide an excellent experience for everyone.
10 Tips for making your website more accessible
1. Use audio to text converter
An Audio to text converter is highly underrated of how much benefit they can bring to your business, especially for people who have a busy schedule and are in public areas and can’t watch videos with sound.
Another advantage you have when using audio to text converter is for those who have hearing disabilities. 69% of people watch videos without sound and roughly 5% of the world’s population suffers from hearing disabilities.
To convert audio to text, you need to have software that does the job. Before you get any software to do the job, pay close attention to how many languages the software supports and in how many formats it’s supported.
Additionally, look at the reviews and trusted companies it has. Some audio to text converters will be used by popular companies like Forbes, Spotify, or some other large companies. In this case, you can easily trust the software and use it for your business.
2. Properly structure your content
Your website’s content is the backbone of how accessible your site is. Great content is what makes visitors come back to you and engage with your visitors and educate them, turning into qualified leads later on.
As we mentioned before, many people suffer from some disability. In this case, structuring your content helps those who have visual disabilities. According to WHO, nearly 30% of the world’s population suffers from a visual disability.
Therefore, when you structure your content, ensure that it’s easy for users with visual and language disabilities to understand what you mean. To start out, try to break your content up into longer blocks, and ensure they are divided into headers and subheaders.
Furthermore, other than that, here are some more guidelines you should follow when it comes to structuring your content:
- Make the line height 1.5x
- Keep the maximum width at 80 characters per line
- Ensure the contrast level is at a fair level
- Don’t use fully justified texts
3. Use a content management system (CMS)
There are plenty of CMSs available out there, but choosing the right one for your website is what matters. WordPress is a popular CMS that is used by the majority of people, but of course, you need to choose what suits your business best.
Whichever CMS you choose to go with, always ensure that it’s accessible to your users. The other elements include editing toolbars and video players, they are great for supporting accessible content.
4. Choose your colors and forms carefully
Color contrast matters a lot and is a vital part of your web accessibility. It allows visitors to distinguish between parts of your page. Always make sure that the saturation and hues of your palette are not very similar to each other.
Alternatively, it’s always a good idea to include a form on your site too. When you include a form, such as a sign-up form, you have to make sure that all of your fields are labeled clearly. Labels help inform readers of what they should be doing.
5. Use keyboard navigation
Keyword accessibility is a crucial part of your website accessibility. Especially for those who have a visual disability, keyboard navigation is important. If your website isn’t properly optimized for keyboard navigation, it might be a highly frustrating experience for your users.
Your primary goal of keyboard navigation is to give your users the ability to interact with every element of your site only by using the tab key. The tab key is how users navigate through a site and one of the easiest ways for visiting a webpage and navigating through it.
Your website might need some work to make it entirely accessible through a keyboard, but there are plenty of resources available to do so.
6. Include alt text for your images
Alt text should be for images, so that your screen reader can entirely understand the message and use of images on the page. This is even more important when you use infographics. When you create the alt text, the text should contain the message you want to process through the image.
If your images include text, the text should be included in the alt. Therefore, it’s always a good idea to include alt text in your images, so they can be used as links.
7. Don’t forget about descriptive labels with form fields
If you want to increase website accessibility on your forms, you can’t forget about descriptive labels with your form fields. Brands love to make the same mistake and that is to use placeholder text as labels. They will usually do this for saving screen real estate, but it all comes down to the usability cost.
The placeholder text is the light-colored text you see in some forms that easily goes away once you start typing in some word. This text disappears once you start entering in some sort of information and in some cases, it might be challenging to remember what the field was for in the first place.
Below, you can take a look at a great example of what is a good way to enter the text and what isn’t.
No matter what you write in your labels, make sure to be clear about it and avoid unnecessary information. You don’t want users to start guessing and make the wrong choice.
8. Keep everything simple
Sounds easy to do, but is harder than you think. Staying simple is the key to having a highly accessible website. Your entire audience might not understand complex terms, so you want to have a copywriter that knows how to be simple.
To keep your content simple, you want to have a few rules in mind whenever you are writing. Here are the most important guidelines to follow:
- If you are using short terms, clarify what they mean
- If you use an acronym, make sure to use the long version of it the first time you use it.
- Try to use lists often
- Use images and videos to clarify any complexities
9. Avoid using flashy UI animations
Animations can be fun to watch, but at the same time, they might be problematic for some people who suffer from seizures that are triggered by flashing lights. Your primary goal here is to make your website more accessible and not less, so this is something you have to address.
Overall, your best solution is to avoid flashy animations altogether and to keep your site safe for all people.
10. Use Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) only when necessary
ARIA is a powerful and complex technical specification for adding accessibility information to elements that aren’t natively accessible. Moreover, you should use native HTML elements whenever they aren’t available. The first rule of ARIA is to not use it in the first place. Many of the functions that need ARIA attributes are now implemented in HTML5.
You can ARIA attributes to your HTML the same way you add classes to your HTML. Only using ARIA attributes is never enough for making complex widgets accessible. Nevertheless, ARIA doesn’t do anything for keyword users. All interactions and behaviors need to be set up by using Javascript.
What is the right way to appropriately use ARIA?
- Add alerts to notify your screen reader users
- Make complex and interactive widgets such as date pickers for making screen reader users accessible
The final cutdown
Web accessibility is an important factor in creating a powerful user experience. With so many people caring about this part and experiencing some sort of disability, it’s more challenging for users to simply navigate through your website.
After all, everyone deserves to have the same experience and when you offer it to users, it can really impact the way they feel and make everything work out for everyone.
About The Author:
Tony Ademi is a freelance SEO content and copywriter. He has been in the writing industry for three years and has managed to write hundreds of SEO-optimized articles. Moreover, he has written articles that have ranked #1 on Google. Tony’s primary concern when writing an article is to do extensive research and ensure that the reader is engaged until the end.
