When you design a website, you expect that it attracts the maximum number of visitors. Millions of web users rely on accessible web designs for their daily internet use. This makes accessibility an essential factor in web design and development. While accessible web designs are an excellent tool for attracting people living with various disabilities, it makes it easy for all web users to navigate your site.

The Americans with Disability Act (ADA) protects users and ensures accessibility in the digital space and the physical environment. But what is accessibility in web design? In this article, you’ll understand what it means and the features that will improve your site’s accessibility, reach a larger audience, and provide a better user experience. 

Importance of Accessible Web Design

In the digital era, web accessibility is essential since your website is likely to be your main point of interaction with your customers. For this reason, you must consider all your web visitors, including disabled ones. If you don’t make your site accessible to people with disabilities, you’ll miss out on traffic and business.

In addition, as more people visit your site, you’ll likely see an increase in traffic and sales. This can give you an advantage over your competitors whose websites are not accessible. Here are a few ways you make your website more accessible.

Navigation by Keyboard Only

It is essential to ensure that your visitors can only navigate your website via a keyboard. If it doesn’t, it affects the web visitors who rely on assistive technology, such as a screen reader, to navigate a website. This category includes persons with motor, cognitive, and sensory disabilities.

Users need to access your site’s page elements such as buttons, forms, and links by pressing the tab key on a computer keyboard. This feature is helpful for persons with motor disabilities who can’t navigate using a mouse and users using screen readers due to visual impairment. However, the feature is also important for users with temporary limb ailment, hand tremors from Parkinson’s disease, those with a broken mouse, or who prefer using keyboard shortcuts. 

Excellent Use of Color

Color is a crucial aspect of a website as it influences how users perceive information on the site. However, in an accessibility web design, color choice matters even more. Here are two issues that make color an essential accessibility feature:

• Using color to communicate information: Unfortunately, many people live with color blindness and cannot tell color differences. So you should avoid using color alone to convey an issue on your website as much as possible. For example, using blue to distinguish a link from other text. You should underline it as well to make it more accessible. 
• Ample color contrast: Some users will have a challenge understanding text that has low contrast between the content and the background. If you look at the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines WCAG) website, it shares color contrast ratios that are appropriate for websites. 

You can look for a web accessibility compliance consultant to assess, audit, and carry out QA engineering to ensure that your site follows the prescribed color rules for accessibility. 

Alt Text for Images

Despite the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words, web images, and other visual aspects constitute a barrier to people who are blind or have impaired vision. Persons with visual impairment using assistive tools to access the internet, such as braille and screen readers, won’t decipher the information on images unless they have an alt tag. 

This is because neither of these technologies cannot read images or the language contained in images. For that reason, you’ll need to include alt text to describe all non-decorative images for the sake of people who are blind or visually impaired. Notably, you should be as specific as possible in your image description. 

Proper Use of Headers

Headings are an excellent tool for providing your page’s outline, helping users understand the page structure and how different sections relate. They also allow users to jump between headings quickly. However, it only helps if you use the headings in a structured way. Your website content should be organized using H1, H2, and H3 level headings. 

Users of assistive technology will significantly benefit from this feature, which aids in the visual organization of the content and makes it intuitive. Your web content must be predictable and intuitive for users to locate what they are looking for quickly. While proper use of headers is essential for persons using assistive technology tools, it also enhances the experience of other users significantly.

Conclusion

So do websites have to be ADA compliant or follow WCAG guidelines? The simple answer is yes. Accessible web design is a requirement by law to promote inclusivity and equality in the digital space. You can work with an ADA-compliant consultant to assess and audit your site to include features that will make your site accessible to all.

You can work with an ADA-compliant consultant or web design agencies like Web Integrations In Edinburgh to assess and audit your site to include features that will make your site accessible to all.