6 Ways to Improve Website Accessibility for People with Disabilities

People with different abilities should be able to interact with your website. Here we discuss several ways that you can improve your website accessibility for people with disabilities. How can you improve your website accessibility for people with disabilities?

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Optimize and test the website

This may seem like an obvious tip, but you should test your site and make sure that it is available to all users. For example, you can optimize the image file size and focus on using the file types that are compatible with different operating systems.

Add alt text

An image in your website is like a huge white space. When someone clicks on it, the image needs to contain the needed text to tell the user what the image is. Alt text will help tell the user what’s behind the image and allow users to easily interact with the image.

Add accessible call to action buttons

A call to action button (CTA) is the button users see after they scroll down the page. It often contains text that requires the user to take some action. There are several types of CTA buttons. Common types are “I Want” and “Start” buttons. Other types of CTA buttons are for product purchases and registration. To enhance accessibility, ensure that your CTA buttons have buttons that don’t automatically roll over as they scroll.

Provide captions and transcripts

Sometimes it can be hard for a person who is blind or visually impaired to read your website. In some cases, your site may not have a text description or visual description of your content. Captions and transcripts are extremely helpful for people who are blind or visually impaired, especially if you have video content or audio content. If you would like to provide transcripts for some of your site content, then consider using Word and VBScript or speech recognition. Using these scripts, you can easily insert your content and upload it to an accessibility resource site like W3C’s Microdata Segmentation Wiki. This also allows your users to read your content if they have low vision.

Create keyboard shortcuts

This is something that you should do right now. The reason is that some people may find it difficult to navigate your website while using a screen reader. In other words, it may not be easy for them to find the needed information. Google’s accessibility guideline clearly states that it is critical that users are able to interact with your website using a screen reader. It is therefore wise that you include keyboard shortcuts for your website. Enable plugins for people with visual impairment, plugins are very important in enhancing their website accessibility. This is because they make it easy for them to access a wide range of content on your website. There are many accessibility plugins that you can use. This can be achieved by going online and reading about them.

Use appropriate colour schemes

Colour affects people in different ways. If you’re looking to improve accessibility, the easiest way to start is to choose a different colour scheme for people with colour blindness. This one will be less than 200. It can improve your website’s accessibility by making it easier for people who are blind or have colour-blindness to read it.

Use Responsive Web Design

For people with a disability, it’s easy to forget the technical aspects of your site. However, without it, they won’t be able to access your website. This is where responsive web design comes into play. You can use this to ensure that your site isn’t unusable for people with a disability. With responsive web design, your site doesn’t change the size and adapt to what the user is viewing.

Make your menu accessible

You should have a menu that users can navigate easily. Include a full keyboard option An essential accessibility tip is to have a full keyboard that can be activated. Also, try to make your menus accessible with a drop-down menu and enable the link boxes for mobile users. Test your navigation No website is perfect and therefore, the navigation needs to be tested. Ensure that they are all accessible and that the links are easy to access.

Use appropriate font sizes

Even though people with different abilities use the same web browser, different software and browsers can make fonts more or less relevant. So, it is important to use appropriate font sizes for the web pages for people with visual impairment. To make the fonts look clearer, most people turn the font size to something like 18px or 24px. Since people with blindness face difficulty reading fonts of 4 or 5 points, they can choose the font size for their font that makes them more accessible to people with visual impairment. Display contrast and skip fonts with contrasting colours. The contrast of contrast ratio makes font colours visible to people with visual impairment. In this case, people who have visual impairment will be able to read the text written in light or dark colours.

Conclusion

In this article, we have discussed several options to help you optimize the accessibility of your website by adding alt text, accessible call to action buttons, captions and transcripts, keyboard shortcuts, colour schemes and more.