What is accessibility anyways?
In simple words, accessibility is being able to navigate a website easy, especially for people with disabilities. This means that if someone blind access your website or business, you want to provide them with a site that can read out loud the page. With this simple-to-follow post, I will show you how to make your website accessible.
You may be wondering,
How do I make my website easier to navigate?
and
Why is it significant for my business?
Well, friend. Having an easy-to-navigate website is crucial for your website to be able to reach a broad audience and to prevent a lawsuit if you’re a business owner. Knowing how to make your website accessible can save you money and headaches.
Let’s say that people with impairments are trying to navigate your site because you provide valuable and unique information that can potentially solve a problem for them or answer a question.
However, they cannot find what they are looking for because they have a situational impairment such as driving, which prevents them from checking their phone. A bad migraine, which worsens with the phone’s brightness. Or they simply don’t have the strength at the moment to grab their mobile device and scroll.
Other people have permanent impairments such as being blind.
Either way, it is nice to make your website accessible because it shows not only that you want to share your content with the world, but also that you care about your audience as well and you recognize that everyone has an equal right to access your content.
You can read more about why having an accessible website is significant here. Tip: it can prevent a lawsuit!
How to Make Your Website Accessible
1. Add captions to your videos.
You want to make sure that your videos have captions so that your audience can better understand the message you are sending them. Also, you do not know how many deaf viewers are visiting your website, so you want to make it accessible to them.
Think about the people in a loud setting and cannot listen to your videos! Adding the captions or a transcript will make sure that your viewers do not miss out on your message, no matter what the setting is.
2. Make your buttons interactive.
People need to know that your buttons are actually clickable. Also, many people may have visual impairments that prevent them from knowing where to click.
Although it may be common sense for many, it may be confusing for others to know where to click. When you go to my home page here, you will see that the “Get The Cheatsheet” button bounces when you hover over it.
3. Make colors vary.
If your entire website consists of one color, you will drive your traffic away. Scary, right?
You should use different, yet consistent colors to show the different types of posts your website contains. As you may have noticed, my website’s colors are pink, grey, some black, and some white.
4. Have everything laid out good.
Let’s face it, some people tend to be lazy while others are very busy. When they get to your website, they want to see all their options laid out
before even clicking away. For instance, when you visit my homepage, viewers can see what my website is about with the welcome banner. However, as they scroll down, they will find quick links to my blog’s categories, recent posts, and free resources.5. Add a plugin.
You may add a plugin that reads the page out loud for your viewers. A good one would be ResponsiveVoice. This plugin supports 51 languages, supports smartphones, tablets & computers, and allows to listen to any post or page.
Many bloggers, entrepreneurs, and developers underestimate the value of creating an accessible website because they may assume that everyone will have a pleasant experience navigating.
Disclaimer: I am not saying that you must implement the points I’ve mentioned before. It solely depends on what your website is about, your niche and whether or not your content is suitable for a specific audience. Knowing how to make your website accessible is one of the key elements of a successful online business with a broad audience.