The web has become a part of our daily lives, providing a multitude of services, information, and experiences. As a business or website, you want to get as many visitors as possible to your website or web pages. However, this can be difficult if we do not prioritize web accessibility because everyone is different regarding health. In this blog we inform you about web accessibility: designing user-friendly websites.

Many individuals have different types of disabilities, so web accessibility helps people with disabilities interact and navigate our websites. It uses multiple tools like screen readers to access and read the content.

Implementing web accessibility practices not only improves the accessibility of your website but also indirectly helps you attract more visitors. This article will explain web accessibility and the best ways to improve it based on international standards.

Introduction to Web Accessibility

Web accessibility refers to making websites accessible to all people, regardless of their disabilities, impairments, and limitations. It follows inclusive practices and principles of developing and designing websites so that anyone can access, understand and interact with the website, regardless of their disabilities. 

Web accessibility goes beyond visual impairment and includes disabilities such as cognitive, hearing, and physical disabilities. Web accessibility is not only a moral obligation, but some countries, such as Canada and U.S., have legal requirements to make websites accessible to people with disabilities.

The ultimate goal of web accessibility is to ensure that information and functionality are accessible to everyone, regardless of user abilities, and failing to implement and prioritize accessibility may deprive a large segment of the population of access to your website. This leads to missing important information and services.

From the company’s point of view, implementing web accessibility practices and principles is imperative to not miss out on a large audience.

Why is it important?

Designing and developing accessible and user-friendly websites are important to gain more visitors and engagement because if we develop a complex website without making it accessible and user-friendly, then joining an email list, contacting you or signing up for a paid program is pretty much hard for visitors because they can’t be able to figure out thing and get frustrated which leads to giving up on the website. 

When it comes to accessibility, you are not just building a simple website for users with different abilities, but you are focusing on building a website that is generally easy to interact with and understand.

Web accessibility improves the user experience for everyone by making your website user-friendly and understandable.

There are hundreds of benefits to making a website accessible. Here are just a few:

• Increased Audience Reach: When you make your website accessible and user-friendly, it will improve your audience reach as everyone will be able to access your website regardless of their abilities.
• SEO benefits: Implementing web accessibility practices and principles will help you align your website with good search engine optimization (SEO) practices, directly improving your website’s ranking on search engine results.
• Better User Experience: Web accessibility can enhance the user experience for all people through improved navigation, keyboard accessibility, and clear and concise content.
• Brand Reputation: The holistic approach builds the website’s trust and customer credibility by demonstrating a strong commitment to high-quality products and social responsibilities.

Best Practices to Improve Web Accessibility

Now you are familiar with web accessibility and its importance. Let’s explore some of the best practices that you should implement in your projects or websites to make them accessible and user-friendly.

The below practices combine both the development and designing parts to make the website more accessible from all around the corner for all users regardless of their abilities.  

HTML Accessibility

A website’s HTML structure and semantic tags play an essential role in web accessibility by providing a meaningful structure to web content.

HTML Structure

HTML provides different types of tags for different purposes, and HTML documents follow a specific order and structure to make the content clear and concise to improve the SEO and web accessibility of the Website.

We know that a website is made up of various sections, such as the footer, header, navigation and main content. While writing HTML code, we should follow proper document structure to improve web accessibility.

For example, there are HTML tags that are specifically used for a particular piece of content, such as:

• <header> tag is used to create the top section of the website. 
• <nav> tag is used to create navigation menus. 
• <main> tag is used to write the website’s main content. 
• <footer> tag is used to create the bottom section of the website. 

The code example below shows the basic structure of a website or web page.

<header>

   <!-- Header content goes here -->

</header>

<nav>

   <!-- Navigation menu goes here -->

</nav>

<main>

   <!-- Main content goes here -->

</main>

<footer>

   <!-- Footer content goes here -->

</footer>

Semantic Tags

Proper HTML document structure ensures proper content segmentation on a website or webpage, while HTML semantic tags are used to form the foundation of an accessible website.

Semantic tags help screen readers, and other assistive devices scan a website and present content accurately to people with all disabilities.

Semantic means “relating to meaning in language or logic.” Writing semantic HTML means using elements to structure your content based on the meaning of each element, not its appearance. For example, the <figure> and <figcaption> elements are used to wrap images with a caption; not a div element is the right choice for that.

<figure>
  <img src="example.jpg" alt="Description of the image">
  <figcaption>Caption for the image</figcaption>
</figure>

Similarly, we should use <ul> and <ol> elements to create lists inside our document structure.

<ul>

      <li><a href="#">Home</a></li>

      <li><a href="#">Blog</a></li>

      <li><a href="#">Career</a></li>

    </ul>

Keyboard Accessibility

Designing and developing a website that can be easily navigated using only the keyboard is one of the important factors of web accessibility. Keyboard accessibility is essential because many assistive devices and technologies rely entirely on keyboard-only navigation.

The implementation of keyboard accessibility is important for individuals who have motor disabilities or cannot use a mouse. Therefore, ensure all users browse and navigate your site using only the keyboard.

When making a site keyboard accessible, ensure that all interactive elements, such as buttons and links, are focusable to indicate which element has keyboard focus.

The CSS code example below shows the focus indicator so your elements will become focusable.

/* CSS to style the focus indicator */
:focus {
  outline: 4px solid red;
}

Colour Contrast

Colour contrast is another important aspect of web accessibility as it ensures that all text and visual elements are easily read and understood, especially for people with visual impairments.

The WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) provides specific requirements for colour contrast ratios, giving us a general idea about combining the background and text colours. 

The code example below shows that we are using a black-on-white background colour for our body so everything is easily visible.

body {

  color: #000000;

  background-color: #FFFFFF;

}

You can use tools like WebAIM to evaluate the colour contrast ratio between the text and background colour.

Responsive and Compatible Design

Responsiveness plays an important role in making a website accessible and user-friendly as it adapts and adjusts the layout, content and functionality based on the screen size and device used by the user. A responsive design ensures that the website looks and functions seamlessly on all screen sizes and devices.

While compatible design focuses on ensuring website accessibility for a wide range of users regardless of disabilities, impairments and limitations, it involves developing websites so that people with disabilities can access the website using assistive technologies without any problems.

When it comes to developing responsiveness, you should use a fluid layout, flexible images, and media queries.

/* CSS for responsive design */
@media screen and (max-width: 540px) {
  /* Styles for small screens */
  .second-logo{
    display: none;
  }
}

The above CSS code shows the use of media queries to make our website responsive and adjust the content accordingly.

Multimedia accessibility

Multimedia accessibility is another important aspect of web accessibility which ensures that all media content on a website is accessible to everyone regardless of abilities. This includes audio, video, and image content types that must be accessible by providing captions, alt text, transcripts, and audio descriptions.

The “alt” attribute of an image tag is used to add descriptive text about the image, which screen readers should later use to describe the image to visually impaired users.

<img src=”car.jpg” alt=” A person driving a car on a busy road,”>

Similarly, you can use a variety of tags to explain videos, images, and audio to users regardless of their disabilities.

Conclusion

It is important to prioritize web accessibility to develop accessible and user-friendly websites that can be accessed by all people, regardless of their disabilities. Web accessibility of a website is improved by implementing practices such as semantic HTML tags, colour contrast, keyboard accessibility, responsive design, and multimedia accessibility.

By adopting web accessibility, we not only attract more visitors and meet legal obligations for countries like Canada and the U.S. but also create a user-friendly and accessible place for our visitors to connect and benefit from it.

Implementing all these practices is sometimes a challenging task for everyone. Sometimes, you seek the help of an expert to improve the web accessibility of your website. We at Delphin Technologies will be pleased to meet all your requirements and help you to improve web accessibility by implementing all the best practices.