Tips to Make Your Website Accessible
Jill Kurtz, Owner,Kurtz Digital Strategy
Accessibility is about improving the web experience for everyone. Accessibility barriers make it difficult or impossible for visitors who are blind, deaf, hard of hearing, or disabled to use your site.
WebAIM analyzed one million homepages for accessibility issues and found that 98% of websites had at least one Web Content Accessibility Guidelines failure on their homepage. Common issues are:
Low-contrast text
Missing image alt text
Empty links
Audit Your Site
The first step in ensuring your site is accessible is an audit. TheWAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Toolwill identify errors on your site.
Tips for Improvement
Make sure all images have alt text, starting with your logo.Alt tags will show when images are not displayed. Think of your site without any images, and make sure the alt text will help the user to make sense of the site in that mode.Structure your content with appropriate headings.Make sure your page has one H1 heading and that subheads follow a logical descending structure.Select fonts and colors for legibility. Avoid font styles and sizes and color palettes that make your site difficult to read. Pay attention to contrast, or the difference between the darkness of your text and the lightness of your background.Clearly describe your links. When linking to another page or post on the web, make sure your linked text is descriptive. “Click here” is not as effective as “learn how to fix accessibility errors.”Give clickable elements space.Make buttons, icons and clickable elements wide-enough so they are easy to click or tap from different devices.Include captions or transcripts for multimedia content.If your site includes videos, add captions or transcripts. It’s best if video and audio content do not auto-play, but if that’s not possible, options to pause or adjust the volume should be obvious on the page.
