Boosting Your Website Accessibility: Tips and Strategies

Intro

With websites becoming the primary source of information, ensuring accessibility for people with hearing and vision disabilities is no longer an option but a necessity.

The website is built to be inclusive and must be available to people with different hearing, visual, and cognitive skills. Most organizations aim to create high-quality websites and prioritize website accessibility to avoid excluding individuals from using their products and services. However, websites with inadequate designs may create obstacles that hinder individuals' ability to use the Internet.

This article will highlight tips and strategies for boosting your website accessibility. You will learn about website accessibility and different enhancing methods. We will also shed light on how to test your websites for accessibility across different web browsers online to ensure the website works for all individuals.

What is Website Accessibility?

Website accessibility involves making sure that it can be navigated easily by people with various abilities, including those who are blind, have low vision, are deaf, or have mobility challenges. This ensures that every user can effectively engage with the content and interface. They can navigate, engage with, and understand the information and content provided on the websites.

In other words, website accessibility aims to ensure that people facing accessibility challenges can have a stable website experience just like those without any limitations. This involves following guidelines such as WCAG to improve the accessibility of web content.

Accessible websites have strong search rankings, attract a broad audience, and require minimal maintenance costs. Additionally, it improves the user experience for all website visitors.

Website Accessibility Principles

Website accessibility is an important part that developers must consider when developing a website. To ensure website accessibility, they follow certain best practices based on four crucial WCAG principles. This states that website content has to be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust (POUR).

Thus, to get into the tips and strategies to boost website accessibility, you must know about the four principles, which are as follows:

Able to be detected (perceivable)

This states that all individuals perceive the content or information displayed on the website. This means that website content must be presented so that people with disabilities can easily comprehend it. All the text, images, and others are easily noticeable.

Operability

Next up is operable. An operable website means your visitors can use it without disruption. It also means that all visitors can use each part of the site’s functionality, from navigating to the contact page to selecting a link from a menu to playing a video.

Understandable

The content on your website, whether written or visual, should be simple to comprehend. Steer clear of complicated language or crowded designs, as they can create difficulties for individuals with cognitive disabilities or speakers of other languages. Arrange your content in a logical manner and provide clear navigation to improve comprehension.

Robust

A functioning website enables users to explore and utilize its functionalities easily. Making your website design and functionality simpler can improve usability and make it suitable for users with disabilities or restrictions.

Ways to Boost Your Website Accessibility

Making websites accessible involves adjusting web content and underlying coding to accommodate users with special needs. This adaptation may include making provisions for assistive technologies like screen readers or magnifiers, which individuals rely on for daily tasks.

There are various ways to enhance web accessibility. Whether implemented alone or in combination, the tips and strategies below represent how you can improve your website accessibility.

Include alternative text

Alternative text is the added short text to the image, video, and others that portray their description. To make your website accessible, you should incorporate alt-text that precisely explains its content or purpose. This explanation should communicate the same message or intent as the image for users who can see it.

This ensures that people with visual or auditory impairments can obtain non-textual information on your website. By offering explanations for pictures, videos, and audio clips, these options ensure that all individuals, including those utilizing screen readers and other assistive technologies, have equal access to the content. You can improve your website's chances of being found by search engines as it allows for the incorporation of popular keywords associated with your pictures.

Functionality of a keyboard

Users can navigate and interact with a website using only their keyboard because of the keyboard input feature. This removes the necessity of a mouse. This lodging makes using assistive technologies replicating key presses, like speech recognition, touchscreen PDAs, and handwriting interpreters easier. These adjustments improve website accessibility for users with precise motor control difficulties.

Subtitles for hearing-impaired individuals

Closed captioning includes presenting text concurrent with a video, capturing all dialogue, pertinent sounds, and ambient noises in coordination with on-screen movements. This functionality is advantageous, and at times necessary, for users who have hearing impairments. Moreover, it enhances the availability of video in scenarios where audio quality is limited.

Ensure that the website allows keyboard navigation

It is crucial for accessibility that your website enables keyboard navigation. A lot of users, especially individuals with motor disabilities, depend on keyboards for web browsing instead of using a mouse. By ensuring your website is compatible with keyboard navigation, you can reach a larger audience, including users who depend on assistive devices.

Ensuring the tab order of your website follows a logical sequence is crucial. This indicates that interactive elements should be traversed in the same order as the visual page layout when users press the Tab key. You should also have clear visual cues that are beneficial for users navigating with a keyboard to indicate the currently selected element. This might involve features such as a border, a color change, or a different style adjustment that stands out. Furthermore, it is advantageous to have a "Skip to Main Content" link featured at the top of every page. This enables keyboard users to skip redundant navigation links and directly access their desired main content.

Careful use of colors

The choice of correct use of colors in the website is one of the tips to boost website accessibility. It serves as the guide and signal that gives navigational help to the users on the website. When you are developing your websites, it is important to note that millions of individuals worldwide may struggle with distinguishing between colors and their various shades. Ensuring a distinct color contrast between the content and its background is always suggested.

You can use an online colorblind web page filter tool by inserting the URL of the webpage. This will allow you to check the different types of filters which simulate visual disabilities.

Enhancing Link Descriptions for Context

For users who depend on screen readers, navigating through links allows them to find desired content efficiently. When a link is selected, it's audibly read by the screen reader's browser. If a link simply says "click here," it fails to convey contextual information about its function. Ensure your links have descriptive labels to give users more explicit guidance and information. Instead of "Click here," opt for "Contact us here." Replace "See more" with "Explore additional related topics here." Using more descriptive contextual links helps users and boosts search engine optimization efforts.

Structuring and organizing content in an adaptable manner

Organizing and structuring content flexibly is important to ensure all users can access information cohesively, no matter how they visit your website. This method is especially advantageous for individuals using assistive tools such as screen readers and those with cognitive impairments who may face challenges with intricate designs or irregular formats.

Assist users with Tabindex navigation

Users accustomed to keyboard navigation rely on the Tab key to move sequentially through a webpage to the next interactive element. Tabindex, on a website, dictates this order of tab movement. For visually impaired users navigating through menus or forms, tab movement is particularly crucial. Forms, in particular, can pose challenges, mainly when they include small elements like checkboxes or buttons that are difficult to click with a mouse. A clearly defined tab index can streamline navigation and enhance user experience.

Create form design carefully

The website forms have a crucial role as they intend to collect contact information to facilitate online purchases. When such forms are nicely designed, you can input your details, make selections, and understand submission errors. For this, the form requires clear and descriptive labels programmatically associated with the field. This helps users rely on screen readers to understand the expected information input.

In cases of user errors, such as omitting a required field or entering invalid data, the errors should be highlighted and described in the text to guide users in rectifying them. Furthermore, it's essential to establish a logical tab order for the form, enabling users to navigate through the fields using the keyboard in a predictable sequence. Moreover, as users tab through the form, there should be a visible indication, such as a border or background color change, indicating which field currently has focus.

_Additional tip: When you have boosted your website accessibility, it is important to test them to ensure that the website is usable by all users. They focus on improving user experience, brand reputation, market reach, and SEO. Website accessibility testing is executed using different software testing tools. However, configuring each tool to meet specific user needs can be challenging. _

Leveraging Accessibility DevTools by LambdaTest proves beneficial for developers in simplifying website development and performing accessibility testing. This tool streamlines the process of ensuring web accessibility, enabling testers to validate functionality and UI according to accessibility testing standards and report any issues.

LambdaTest is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform that facilitates manual and automated tests at scale across over 3000 real devices, browsers, and OS combinations. The Accessibility DevTools by LambdaTest allows website testing using Screen Readers and real-time speech viewers using non-visual desktop access, which converts audio/visual output into text format. This addresses visual disabilities effectively and enables smooth navigation and interaction with the platform.

Conclusion

This blog has mentioned some tips and strategies to boost your website accessibility.

To remove the online barriers to accessing websites, websites are designed to allow people with disabilities to navigate the site effortlessly. It is a key component of successful web development, enhancing the organization’s reputation and reflecting its inclusive value.

You can use the discussed method to make your website accessible and ensure that people, regardless of any disability can access and engage with the website. However, you should remember that web accessibility guidelines are constantly changing. Therefore, consider building and managing a website that is easily accessible as a continuous effort rather than a single project.