The Importance of Website Accessibility
Sustainability does not just involve reducing your carbon footprint, but also making positive choices for people. This means website accessibility should be a high priority in your website design. Making your website accessible means that it does not discriminate against internet users with disabilities and impairments. 1 in 5 people have a disability or impairment in the UK. Accessibility is making simple choices that make a huge difference to the people that need it.
How To Make a Website Accessible: WCAG
It is important to understand the difficulties some users can face in order to understand how we can make their web experience easier. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) are an organisation that publishes standards and guidelines on accessibility, internationalisation, privacy and security to assist web designers and developers. The accessibility guidelines are known as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). The WCAG concentrate on four principles required to provide users with accessibility: perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. The WCAG describes 3 levels of accessibility: A (minimum), AA and AAA (highest). Many organisations try to conform to level AA to cover a large proportion of the issues that might be faced by internet users.
Key Accessible Website Features
Some of the features to keep in mind to make your website accessible include: Colour Contrast Keyboard Functionality HTML Structure Image Alt Tags Font Size Colour Contrast: The ratio between text colour and background colour should be a minimum of 4.5:1. This increases the readability of the text and aids users with vision issues. Tools such as Adobe Color can be used to analyse the contrast between colours. Keyboard Functionality: Users should be able to navigate your website by solely using their keyboard. This helps users with motor impairments and disabilities making it difficult to use a mouse. HTML Structure: It is important that the elements used to mark up your website are descriptive of the content they contain. Browsers have built-in accessibility features that depend on HTML element types. Image Alt Tags: Every image on your website should have an alt tag. This enables screen readers to describe what the image is to a user with vision problems. Font Size: Choosing an appropriate font size is crucial for readability. If it is too small, users will struggle to read it. Equally font sizes that are too big can be difficult for users to read.
The Benefits of Website Accessibility
Making accessible web design choices can be very simple but can make a huge difference to a wide range of users with impairments and disabilities. It will help to attract a wider audience with no one feeling discriminated. Your business can also benefit as offering an inclusive web presence helps to build confidence and trust. A brand focusing on inclusivity and usability will be regarded as more responsible and thoughtful. Website accessibility is also linked to providing a better user experience. It helps all users as the aim is to make the content easier to navigate and enhance readability. This improvement in navigation also helps increase Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Search Engines like content that is well structured, easy to navigate and can be processed efficiently.