The world is becoming more socially aware and conscious – the idea that a section of the population cannot access a building or cross the road safely is abhorrent. Of course, there is still a long way to go in making the world a fully accessible place for people with different or limited abilities, but the internet is lagging far behind. Fortunately, technology constantly improves. What’s more, if you don’t update your website every few years, your business will look dated and out of touch. There are many opportunities and resources to make your website accessible – you just need to take advantage of them.
Focus on the Content
Your content will be the bulk of your website, so it’s a good place to start. Your overall aim for your content is for it to be good quality. This should always be the case, no matter who you are trying to appeal to, and fortunately, this will serve to make it accessible too. Content writing is a skill that takes time to master and is not something you want to get wrong. You should consider contacting a company like Click Intelligence which provide professional content writing services to make the most of your site.
Your content should be free of spelling and grammar mistakes as a baseline and have high readability. There are many readability scorers online where you can check and score your text – and the level should be determined by your audience. If your audience naturally includes people who find it harder to understand complex sentences, you will need to make your content easier to read.
Links (internal and external) are important in a website’s content. The links should be as accurate and descriptive as possible. It should be clear from the linked words what type of content the link will lead to, and ‘click here’ or ‘read more’ should be avoided.
Improve Navigation
Along with the above, your content should have allocated headings and subtitles (marked appropriately as H1, H2, etc.). Doing this breaks up the content into easier-to-manage sections and clearly indicates changes of thought to a computer algorithm or visual to audio software.
The whole website should be navigated using only a keyboard. People with a visual impairment or restricted hand mobility will not be able to use a mouse to navigate your site and will rely on keyboard navigation to get them around. If your site throws up blocks, they’ll have to head to another site, probably a competitor. You can incorporate this from the start using a website builder with these features. You should also check that any third-party plug-ins or widgets are as accessible as the rest of your site.
You should also allow users to alter your website’s text size and color contrast freely. There are overlays and software which will do this for you, but when designing the website, it should be possible for a visitor to your website to alter it in any way needed.
Your branding colors might restrict you, but you should also consider the colors and tones used on your website, as someone with color blindness will view the website differently. It may be impossible for them to use. A simple change of tone can be the difference between a usable website and one which is unreadable.
Create Multimedia Accessibility
Long gone are the days when a website was just a few pages of static text. These days it is necessary for businesses to have multimedia content, particularly linked to social media pages. This boosts customer interaction and makes the company feel more dynamic and trustworthy. It is important that these content types are not overlooked when making the website accessible. Transcripts of interviews, close captioning, subtitles, audio descriptions and so on can improve the accessibility of a range of multimedia content. You will not be aiming at a small section of people either – you do not know how your audience will view the content; many put subtitles on a film if they are in a noisy environment, for instance.
Improving your website’s accessibility is necessary for the society we want to live in. Still, all the techniques will boost your website in general and bring a wider audience to your company or blog. It can be a difficult concept to get right, though, and going to a professional company such as Click Intelligence will mean having a high-quality website that drives sales and audiences.
As mentioned above, the technology surrounding accessibility is improving all the time, so there will be many options to use technology to get these additions to your content, without you spending the time typing out an interview, for example. Even Giphy has partnered with an accessibility partner to provide alt text to gifs – meaning no one has to miss out on the joke.
