Web accessibility is a crucial consideration in all facets of life, ranging from education, the government, the healthcare sector, workplaces, and many more. Everyone has a right to access information on the web, whether hardware, software. It doesn’t matter the person’s race, age, location, sex, origin, or language. Read on to understand more about web accessibility.
What Are Web Accessibility Laws?
Web accessibility laws protect people living with disabilities allowing them to access digital services and information via the internet. This is regardless of the person’s physical or development challenges or impairments.
This practice applies to all web content, including links and documents. Each site owner needs to adhere to accessibility laws and ensure that their sites do not discriminate against people living with disabilities.
How to Make Your Website Accessible
Create a Keyboard-Friendly Website
A keyboard-friendly website means that it should work without a mouse because some technologies only work with keyboard navigation. In this case, a user should access all features on your site, such as links, pages, content, among other elements.
Users can easily navigate the website using a tab key on the keyboard. So, ensure all the information on your site can get accessed using the Tab key.
Users Should Be Able To Enlarge Font Sizes
Some of your online users may have blurred vision. Such people will find it challenging to read small text sizes. They can go to the font section and increase the fonts and see the text clearly.
Also, since you may want your online readers to reach out to you using the call-to-action buttons, ensure the buttons are in a large font to allow your users quick wcag accessibility access. In short, each element on your site should be visible to visually impaired people.
Be Color-Sensitive
Think about color and contrast when developing or redesigning your website. Some people are color-blind. Meaning they uniquely perceive colors. In this case, you need to be careful when choosing colors that everyone can quickly distinguish while navigating through your site.
Whatever color you choose for the text should stand out against the background. If you’re designing with a dark color, use a lighter one against it and ensure they do not outshine each other.
Videos and Multimedia Should Be Accessible
A website with videos attracts a larger audience and a higher user engagement than one without videos. When developing your site, ensure you include videos to increase site engagement.
However, since blind and visually impaired people can’t see videos and hear audio, you can enhance the features using audio description to allow blind people to enjoy videos on your site. Try and be short and concise with your videos and avoid long descriptions since they can be boring and tiring to the user.
The Bottom Line
It is important to make your website accessible to everyone when developing and redesigning it. This is better done in the earlier stages to evaluate the process and ensure your website is accessible. However, if your web is up already without accessibility, you can still make changes via the settings and ensure the website meets accessibility laws.
