Website accessibility means making sure that everyone, including people with disabilities, can use your website effectively. This includes people with visual impairments, hearing difficulties, motor disabilities, and cognitive challenges. Accessible design is not just a legal consideration. It is good business practice that improves the experience for all your visitors and can boost your search engine rankings as well.
Why Accessibility Matters
Roughly one in five people live with some form of disability. If your website is not accessible, you are potentially excluding a significant portion of your audience. For a local business, this means turning away paying customers who simply cannot use your site.
Beyond the moral argument, there are practical reasons to care about accessibility. In many jurisdictions, websites are required to be accessible under equality and discrimination laws. Businesses with inaccessible websites can face legal challenges, fines, and reputational damage.
Accessible websites also tend to perform better in search engines. Many of the same practices that improve accessibility, such as proper heading structures, descriptive alt text, and clean code, also help search engines understand and index your content more effectively.
Key Accessibility Principles
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, known as WCAG, provide a framework for making web content accessible. The guidelines are organised around four principles.
Perceivable
Information and interface elements must be presented in ways that all users can perceive. This means providing text alternatives for images, captions for videos, and ensuring that content is not conveyed solely through colour.
Operable
Users must be able to navigate and interact with your website using various input methods. This includes keyboard navigation for people who cannot use a mouse, sufficient time to read and interact with content, and avoiding design elements that could trigger seizures.
Understandable
Content and navigation must be understandable. This means using clear, simple language, making navigation consistent and predictable, and helping users avoid and correct mistakes when filling out forms.
Robust
Your content must be robust enough to be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies like screen readers. This requires clean, standards-compliant code.
Practical Steps to Improve Accessibility
Add Alt Text to All Images
Every image on your website should have descriptive alt text that explains what the image shows. Screen readers use this text to describe images to visually impaired users. Good alt text is concise and descriptive. Instead of "image1.jpg," write "Team of builders working on a residential roof repair."
Use Proper Heading Structure
Headings should follow a logical hierarchy, with h1 for the main page title, h2 for major sections, h3 for subsections, and so on. Screen readers use heading structure to help users navigate the page, so skipping heading levels or using headings purely for visual styling creates confusion.
Ensure Sufficient Colour Contrast
Text must have enough contrast against its background to be readable by people with low vision or colour blindness. There are free online tools that check your colour combinations against WCAG standards. As a general rule, dark text on a light background or light text on a dark background provides good contrast.
Make Forms Accessible
Every form field should have a visible, associated label. Error messages should clearly explain what went wrong and how to fix it. Required fields should be clearly marked. Form fields should be navigable with a keyboard, and the tab order should follow a logical sequence.
Provide Keyboard Navigation
Many people navigate websites using only a keyboard. Make sure all interactive elements, including links, buttons, and form fields, can be reached and activated using the keyboard alone. Ensure that the focus indicator, the visual highlight that shows which element is currently selected, is visible and clear.
Caption Your Videos
If your website includes video content, provide captions or transcripts. This benefits not only deaf and hard-of-hearing users, but also anyone watching in a noisy environment or who prefers to read rather than listen.
Testing Your Website's Accessibility
Several free tools can help you assess your website's accessibility. Browser extensions like WAVE and axe can scan your pages and identify common issues. However, automated tools cannot catch everything. Testing your site manually by navigating with only a keyboard and using a screen reader gives you a much clearer picture of the actual user experience.
An Ongoing Commitment
Accessibility is not a one-time task. It is an ongoing practice that should be considered every time you add or change content on your website. Building accessibility into your workflow from the start is much easier and cheaper than retrofitting it later. Start with the basics outlined here, and gradually work toward a more comprehensive approach as your understanding deepens.