The importance of website accessibility

Everything starts with basic human accessibility. If you want to attract more visitors to your website, you’ll need to ensure that as many people as possible can access it and gain valuable information from your pages.

Our goal when creating content is to provide everyone with equal access to all websites. This might seem like a monumental task, but it doesn’t have to be. With Compliant.io, it’s easy to start evaluating your website for ways to improve accessibility and make it easier for users to get more out of your content.

Why website accessibility is important

When your website is more accessible for people with disabilities, you increase your consumer base and attract more users. Users need to have a good experience on your website, or they won’t return, no matter how great your products and services are. Even users without disabilities can appreciate a well-designed website that takes care to be inclusive.

Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act governs the rules of website accessibility for US governmental websites. It has rules and specifications that let those websites work for people with all types of disabilities. If you want your website to be held to rigorous standards, try implementing some of their accessibility suggestions or expanding on their ideas to ensure that everyone has access to your content.

Plus, expanding your website’s accessibility does nothing to impede users without disabilities, so you’ll be sure to include as many users as possible.

How to make your website more accessible

Considering the wide range of disabilities you need to account for, it would be impossible to list every suggestion to improve website accessibility. However, the following sections address some of the most common types of accessibility improvements that will make a significant difference for your users.

Use closed captions

One of the most popular ways to increase accessibility is to add closed captions to video content. Deaf or hard-of-hearing viewers may not know how to read lips or have difficulty making out what’s going on in the video without closed captions. Unfortunately, while YouTube does automatically generate AI captions, they’re often laughably incorrect.

It’s better to hire a professional service to add closed captions to your videos, so your viewers can get the full experience, even if they can’t hear the audio. Additionally, closed captions can open up your video to people who don’t speak your language and potentially expand your viewership dramatically.

Use transcripts

Another way to help improve your website’s accessibility is to provide transcripts of your video content. Transcripts benefit both low vision and hard-of-hearing viewers since they can see what was said or use a voice-to-text automated voice to read out what happened during the video. It can also be helpful for people with cognitive disorders who have trouble focusing.

If your video is more than a few minutes long, it might be difficult for viewers to focus on the content of the video. However, with a transcript, they can quickly scroll down to the information they need.

Utilize pictures

Breaking up your text content with pictures can make it easier for people of all literacy levels to gain something useful from your website. For example, even the smartest person would be tempted to buy a shirt if they saw its picture instead of just reading about it.

Pictures also break up text to make it readable for people who have low vision or have trouble understanding your language.

Keep it clean

Content moderation is vital to prevent harassment and offensive comments from turning your website into other’s platforms for spewing hate. Many websites include areas for users to leave comments or reviews, but some people take the idea too far and leave offensive comments that contain foul language and negative ideology.

It’s challenging to keep up manually, but content-reading applications can monitor the words left by employees, users, and comment responders.

It isn’t that you’re silencing people’s opinions, but there’s nothing that makes someone leave a website faster than seeing a truly repulsive comment front and center on a message board or review section.

Keep up appearances

The first thing users will notice is how your website appears. If you have a few popups or brightly flashing colors, that can deter users from continuing before they have a chance to absorb any of your content. That is also true for websites that don’t have easy navigation bars or buttons near the top.

It’s important to make your website easier to read by increasing the font size, increasing the contrast, choosing a font type that is more legible without all of the excessive frills and adding additional ways for people to identify hyperlinks.

Hyperlinks might not seem like they need additional identifiers, but hyperlink indicators aren’t always visible for low vision or colorblind viewers. Adding an underline or bolding the text you’re linking out from will indicate that they can click for more information on that subject.

Check navigation controls

Visitors with mobility-related disabilities may not use a mouse and will need to navigate with the keyboard. Therefore, you’ll want to ensure that your website has navigation capabilities tied to the arrow keys and is intuitive for all users.

Add appropriate warnings

Adding warnings helps visitors with seizure disorders avoid pages or videos that might induce a seizure or cause them migraines. If possible, avoid creating web pages that need seizure warnings and always include a warning in videos that utilize strobe lights.

Just to be on the safe side, always include a note with a timestamp indicating when the seizure warning starts and ends.

Make it mobile-friendly

Many users prefer to scour the web on their phones, with or without disabilities. When you properly format your web pages for mobile users, you’ll increase your audience. Don’t include any overly long paragraphs or use run-on sentences. Keep everything short and sweet.

Another way to improve mobile accessibility is to add bullet points or new headers whenever possible. That also increases readability for people who have trouble focusing on more extended text.

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How accessibility affects rankings

As you make content accessible for all people, you're making your content accessible for all search engines too. There are plenty of aspects to consider when it comes to your website’s rankings, but try thinking of it in basic terms.

If you want your website to appear on a specific search engine, you’ll need web crawlers to categorize and label your web pages. By granting those web crawlers access to your website, you’re ensuring that users will be able to find and view your website when they search relevant key terms.

As you expand your website’s accessibility, more people will view your website. However, you don’t want users clicking on your link and immediately navigating away from your landing page because they can’t maneuver around your website or cannot parse your content.

Plus, as you work to include synonyms and rephrase certain statements, you’ll add more essential search terms. So increasing accessibility is a win-win scenario for business owners and users.

There’s no end point

It might be tempting to see this as a long checklist that you’ll complete once. But, in reality, companies are developing new technologies to increase accessibility and make it easier for people with disabilities to have access to the internet.

You need to stay informed about future web accessibility developments as we all learn more about what makes things easier and what doesn’t.

In conclusion

Some of these suggestions may be harder to implement than others, but we highly suggest looking into all ways to make your website more accessible. You’ll increase your traffic and stay ahead of the competition by appealing to everyone, not just one group of customers.

Contact us at Compliant.io for more information about how we can help you reshape your website to meet everyone’s needs, including those with disabilities.