Website accessibility makes it possible for disabled people to use websites and technologies specifically designed and created for them. It helps them navigate, interact and understand the content in a site.
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Website accessibility caters to people with disabilities including, physical, visual, cognitive, auditory, and neurological.
However, it also comes with numerous benefits for everyone. For example:
- When using a smartphone, smart TV, smartwatch, and any other smart gadget with a small screen or different input methods
- Older people who may have declining abilities due to age
- Someone with a temporary disability like lost spectacles or a broken limb.
- People are experiencing situational limitations like bright sunlight or an environment where audio cannot be heard.
- Slow internet or limited and expensive bandwidth.
Why is it important?
The web has a lot of things that people need daily. They include government, education, health care, commerce, and employment services, among many others.
If your website is not accessible to a certain group of people, they may miss a lot of essential information.
That’s why you must make sure you provide equal opportunity and equal access to everyone, including those with disabilities. This ensures that everyone participates actively in society.
Also, when a website is accessible, people can do business regardless of any disability affecting them. For example, if someone is visually impaired, cannot read printed materials, can use audio, or anyone who cannot walk to a local store for shopping can do it via a website.
Besides, web accessibility improves SEO, enhances usability and mobile web design.
When a website is accessible, people interact and find information effortlessly. It gets maximum exposure, and with time, sales start going up.
Barriers hindering accessibility to audio, visual, and audio content are overcome through web technologies. This ensures anyone can access your products or services, which translates into big profits as you will get some quality conversions in the traffic.
Visual
Visual disability varies; some people come with partial or low vision. They suffer from severe long-sightedness or short-sightedness. When accessing a website, someone with low vision can use the following idea:
- Adjusting the text using the browser
- Using some software systems to magnify the web pages
- Overriding the web pages style using contrasting color schemes
- Make use of braille displays or screen readers.
A website with accessibility can limit people with low vision. Some of the things that can make a website unusable by people who are partial blind include:
- Text with fixed height, which means it cannot be resized
- Semantically connected features with the distance apart
- Poor color contrast
- Busy pages
Blindness
Blindness comes with different degrees, and in some countries, there are legal measures in place. Legally blind people may have little vision or nothing at all.
Whichever the case, they cannot use websites like normally sighted people. These people require the following to use a website:
- Braille display
- Screen reader
Also, if web pages have the following features, people with blindness will have difficulties using them:
- Images without proper alternate text
- Improperly worded links
- Badly marked pages
- Lack of page headings
- Inaccessible PDFs
- Java, Flash, or any other RIA functionality
- Ajax page updates
Color Blindness
Most people think that color blindness means that people can only see white and black. However, it varies from one person to the other.
Each person is affected in a different way, and their perception of colors differs from other people. The best thing is that these people do not need to install anything on their computers.
The following can make a website inaccessible to those who are color blind:
- Little color contrast between the background and text
- Use of only colors to show meaning
Hearing Impairments
Just like visual impairment, deafness manifests in various degrees. It can be a slight loss of hearing to total deafness. There is a misconception that those deaf but can see should not have a problem using the internet.
However, the web has changed, and more multimedia experience has come up. This means that the deaf cannot access the content; sign language should be used to cater to them.
If a website has the following features, the hearing impaired may have difficulties accessing content:
- Lack of captioning in video content
- Audio content without captioning
- Complex or obscure language
Cognitive Impairments
Cognitive impairments encompass many conditions. Some of them are intellectual disability, dyslexia, and others like autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
To make a website more accessible to people with cognitive impairments, the following things should be avoided:
- Use of wide columns and large text blocks
- Uneven texts between the words
- Brilliant white background
- Text styles with serifs
- Italic texts
- Small font
- Flickering or moving images and effects
Physical
Physical disabilities are known as motor disabilities, and they are muscular weaknesses or lack of control. For example, someone may suffer from poor coordination, sensation limitation, paralysis, joint disorders, and tremors.
Other physical disabilities may be due to missing limbs and disorders like arthritis. Such people may require installing software systems to help them access websites without using their limbs. This may include automatic videos and slides.
Luckily there are tools to make the website accessible.
Color Safe
Color Safe gives users to color and comply with AA & AAA. It is usually based on font size, background color, and font weight. It helps you come up with brand colors that will not reduce the legibility of your text.
Colour Contrast Analyser
This tool is a Chrome extension and can look through various web pages, PDFs, and images. It identifies the text elements that do not comply with color contrast terms. You just use it on the particular part of a page you want to focus on.
WebAIM Wave
WebAIM is a tool used to evaluate and look at live websites and provide a list of errors hindering website accessibility. For example, it alerts if your page doesn’t have proper links and headings and other important elements that may hinder disabled people from navigating the website. It is a Chrome extension that must be installed but is easy to use.
NVDA
NVDA means NonVisual Desktop Access is available for free. It is an NV screen reader made by this non-profit organization from Australia.
It is mostly used by the visually impaired across the globe to access various websites online. It also gives web designers a chance to experience their websites and know what the visually impaired will get from a site.
How and why Google ranks accessable sites
It is clear that search engines, including Google, promote websites with web accessibility more than those that do not have the technology.
So for several months, an open-source known as Lighthouse was introduced by Google. It is an automated tool for web developers to improve accessibility and web pages quality.
There are many tools, so Lighthouse is not unique but stands out since it’s from Google.
Website accessibility has a relationship with search engine optimization elements. For example, Google mostly ranks sites with proper accessibility techniques included in the content, visual design, metadata, and design development for organic search.
This is because crawlers cannot hear or see and use ways similar to those used by the disabled.
Besides, crawlers depend on web content to determine relevance, evaluate, and index sites, not the videos, audios, or images. While the web access features are for the differently-abled people, they improve the quality of a website. It gets more visitors since everyone can use it.
A multichannel experience is now available across contexts, environments, and devices. For example, someone will look for products online through ads and order the goods to be delivered to their doorstep.
One thing that complicates things more is that most services available only online do not have comparable substitutes in a “built” environment. This can hinder important messages from reaching people with disabilities.
For example, requesting a Lyft, tracking updates via a healthcare portal, and using affordable services such as Legal Zoom may be impossible.
This is the reason some brands are using meaningful web designs to enable easy website accessibility for all.
How Do Web Accessibility And SEO work?
Today, just having a website that exceeds user experience and rapid advance, you must also offer more than your competitors. Here are some practices that will align AEO and accessibility:
- Use of the right alternative texts instead of images
- Clear heading structure
- Easy to understand link text
- Short but descriptive titles
- Avoid JavaScript where it’s not needed
- Lessen dependence on mouse interaction
- Use of standard web formats where possible
- Provision of captions and transcripts for videos
- Language identification for the page content
- Several ways to find content. They include content table, site maps, and search
- Use of text as much as possible instead of images
- Giving human-readable URLs
- Clear navigation and consistent page structures
- Definition of acronyms and abbreviations
To Wrap Up
There is plenty of evidence that web accessibility supports SEO rankings and that Google favors such pages. People should take advantage of this and create websites that are highly accessible. They will do well with a few SEO techniques and unlike the inaccessible website.