A website is helpful for communication, information, and business engagement in the increasingly digital world. Your website must be accessible to all. An accessible website is, therefore, a space open to everyone, irrespective of the abilities or equipment used.
Compliance with the best practices for access will enable you to make your website user-friendly and accessible so that your content attracts more people to interact with you. Here are some fundamental strategies that will help you design an accessible website.
1. Use Clear and Simple Language
Accessibility begins with the communication on your website. Clear, simple language helps everyone understand your content better. Complicated language and jargon can be a great barrier for many users, especially those who have cognitive disabilities or are not native speakers.
Tips:
- Short Sentences and Paragraphs: Write briefly. Long blocks of text can be intimidating and challenging to read.
- Headings and Bullet Points: Use headings and bullet points to space text more easily. This improves readability and helps users quickly find what they are looking for.
- Define Specialized Terms: If your content contains technical or specialised terms, sometimes you may need to define them for your audience to be on the same page.
Most importantly, clear communication helps you serve a larger customer base with an enriching user experience that makes everyone enjoy your content.
2. Make Navigation Easy
A user-friendly website is well-structured and easy to navigate. It should allow users to find what they are searching for quickly and simply. Complex navigation can confuse users, causing you to lose visitors rapidly.
Tips:
- Clear Menu Structure: The menu structure should reduce confusion and simplify navigation. The content should be organised sensibly with topics in a related category.
- Labels: Use descriptive words for labels. In other words, they should tell people what will happen when they click it. For example, instead of saying “click here,” you can say “download the report.”
- Include a search feature. This feature will help users find content easily if your site is large.
This will ensure that everyone can navigate your site quickly and effectively.
3. Provide Text Alternatives for Images and Videos
Many users utilise screen readers or other assistive technologies to access content, and text equivalents for images and videos assist these technologies in presenting information more effectively. This practice enhances access for visually impaired people and anyone who may experience trouble loading multimedia content.
Tips:
- Descriptive Captions: Use descriptive captions on images so the reader knows what the images represent. It is often hard to understand the content without reading these captions.
- Subtitles and Transcripts: Include subtitles or transcripts with the video so deaf people can see it and people who prefer to read rather than watch can do so.
- Decorative Images: When an image is purely decorative and does not convey information about the page, we can specify that it is an empty alt attribute.
By offering alternatives, you ensure your content remains accessible to all users.
4. Ensure Keyboard Accessibility
More people use the keyboard to navigate websites than the mouse, especially users with motor impairments. For this reason, your website must be completely accessible using a keyboard.
Tips:
- Interactive Elements: All interactive elements, including buttons and links, must be accessible by pressing the Tab key so users can easily navigate.
- Avoid Keyboard Traps: Avoid “traps” where the user gets stuck with an element and cannot navigate using only the keyboard. This is frustrating and disorienting.
- Focus Indicators: You can indicate which element is focused so that people know where they are on the page. Visual cues, a change of colour or an outline of the focused item can do this.
Creating a keyboard-friendly site guarantees that users who use their keyboards can move freely to your content.
5. Design with Color Contrast in Mind
Good design attends to aesthetics but also to how users perceive colours. Consider that even a small percentage of users have some form of visual impairment or colour blindness and cannot read content if there isn’t enough contrast between text and background colours.
Tips:
- High Contrast Combinations: Dark text against a light background, or vice versa, provides good contrast. The standard text must have a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1.
- Avoid Colour Alone for Meaning: Information conveyed through colour must be supported by text or patterns. For example, red should be used instead of the word “Error.”
- Readable Fonts and Sizes: Choose readable fonts and font sizes that are legible to all, particularly the visually impaired. Ensure your text is readable by ensuring it is large enough, ideally at least 16 pixels for body text.
Good colour contrast ensures readability for everyone.
6. Create User-Friendly Forms
As you well know, forms are a very common feature on websites. They allow users to provide information for future communication. It is essential to make forms accessible since complicated forms can be intimidating and can cause users to get frustrated.
Tips:
- Simple Design: Forms should not be complicated. They should limit the number of fields to a minimum and designate each input with clear labels. Long forms overwhelm. So, only ask for the necessary information.
- Grouping Fields: Group related fields together and add obvious visual cues, like boxes or lines, to guide a user through a page.
- Helpful Error Messages: A help error message should explain what needs to be corrected when a form is submitted incorrectly. So, instead of saying, “This field is required,” tell which field is missing and why it is required.
Making your forms accessible makes using your website easier for all users. You ensure that people can accomplish their intended tasks without frustration.
7. Make Sure Your Website is Mobile-Friendly
Your website must work well on mobile as smartphone and tablet use increases. Content should be just as accessible on a mobile device as it is on a desktop. This can be why website designs that look bad or do not work correctly on mobile devices might alienate many of your users.
Tips:
- Responsive Design: Use responsive design to change your website’s perspective of screen size. Thus, users will always have a good experience, regardless of their device.
- Large Touch Targets: Touch targets, such as buttons, should be large enough to be tapped easily. A good rule of thumb is to make buttons at least 44 pixels in height and width.
- Avoid Hover Effects: Do not use clunky features on mobile devices, such as hover effects, which are primitive for touch users.
This is just one of the reasons why a mobile-friendly website makes surfing easier and without problems for all parties involved, most especially those who are forced to use mobile devices to surf online.
8. Test Your Website for Accessibility
The best way to ensure accessibility for your website is by testing. Feedback from real users will reveal all the defects of the website. Continuous testing can help you identify potential barriers and perfect your website to better serve the user.
Tips:
- Usability Testing: Have usability testing done on persons with disabilities to open one’s eyes and ears to how they experience the site. This is a valuable set of feedback that indicates how real users would use your site.
- Automated Tools: Use automated tools to check your site for accessibility issues, but don’t use only these products because automated tools are unlikely to pick up on everything. They can be an excellent starting point, but human testing counts.
- Continuous Improvement: Accessibility is not one-time work. Continuously improve based on feedback and testing results.
Make proactive efforts to resolve issues when they come.
9. Stay Informed About Accessibility Standards
Web accessibility is constantly changing. If you really wish to know what will make your website accessible, you need to keep track of the new standards and best practices.
Tips:
- Follow Resources: You can improve your website’s accessibility by learning about the new guidelines before they become mainstream.
- Participate in Training: Attend training or workshops to learn the new tools and techniques. This may also be an excellent way to connect with other professionals involved.
- Share Knowledge: Share with your team what you learn.
Keeping your website up to date is the only way to ensure that it will still be useful to everyone over time.
10. Promote an Inclusive Culture
Accessibility is not about compliance but about facilitating an inclusive environment where everybody feels welcome. An accessible culture in your organisation encourages a better user experience.
Tips:
- Advocate for Accessibility: Advocate accessibility at every website development stage.
- Collaborate with Team Members: Work with a team when making decisions on design and content. This also promotes diversity, which increases representation in the discussion of website features.
- Celebrate Successes: Share success stories and lessons learned to inspire others who may also want to make their websites accessible. This is a good way to encourage teams to prioritise accessibility.
By promoting inclusivity, you contribute to a more equitable digital landscape, making the web a better place for everyone.
Conclusion
An accessible website opens the door to many audiences. We hope that the outlined best practices for creating an accessible website will encourage and help everyone to create welcoming and usable websites.
