How Do I Make My Website Accessible?

Making your WordPress website accessible is not only a good design practice, but it also ensures that everyone has equal access to your web content and applications.

This means that any visitor, regardless of disability or impairment, should be able to access and use your site.

This is important when you consider the fact that one in four adults in the United States has a disability of some kind. In other words, if you’re not building with accessibility in mind, up to a quarter of your website’s visitors may struggle to access your content.

Fortunately, there is a set of guidelines you can use to review your web design and functionality.

The W3C standards outline several levels of accessibility. Of course, you’ll also want to take laws and regulations into account, since accessibility is a legal matter as well.

In this video, we’ll take a look at what accessibility means online. We’ll also dive into some of WordPress’s new additions that make accessible design easier. There’s a lot to cover, so let’s get started!

#1. Make Sure Your Site Is Keyboard-Friendly
Put simply: for a website to be accessible, it must work without the use of a mouse. Therefore, your goal should be to ensure that all web content and navigation can be accessed using Tab. To help you out with this, WebAIM provides a handy guide for keyboard accessibility design. https://webaim.org/

#2. Make Sure All Content Is Easily Accessible For The Vision Impaired
While this is usually not a problem, it can be an issue when a page contains dynamic content. In short, content is dynamic if it can change without the page it’s on reloading. This can become a problem if the site doesn’t inform assistive tools of the change, then the user will miss the new content. One way you can do this is by using ARIA landmarks.

#3. Add Alt Text to All Images
When adding images to WordPress, you’ve probably noticed this field.
Here, you can enter the alternative text for an image. This text acts as a replacement for the image if it fails to load. However, alt text (sometimes called alt attributes, alt descriptions, or alt tags) is also accessed by screen readers to “read” the picture for the blind. You can, therefore, use this field to describe an image, giving context to users who would otherwise miss it.

#4. Choose Your Colors Carefully
We often talk about color blindness as if it’s a, no pun intended, black-and-white issue. However, it’s more of a spectrum since different people perceive colors in unique ways. As such, you need to make sure the colors you select on your site contrast well to ensure that everyone can distinguish between various elements on the page. The most pressing issue is making sure text stands out against the background. Ideally, you should set a dark color against a light one, making sure that they don’t bleed into each other.

#5. Use Headers to Structure Your Content Correctly
Another key task to make sure your site’s accessible - is structuring your content by using headers carefully. Doing this will make your content much easier to understand and digest. Additionally, clear headers also help screen readers interpret your pages. This makes it much easier to provide in-page navigation. It’s also simple to do, since you only need to ensure you use the correct heading levels in your content.

#6. Don’t Use Tables for Anything Except Tabular Data
When it comes to displaying data, tables are handy. They make it much easier for all users, including those using assistive technology, to parse a large amount of data. To get the maximum benefit, however, you’ll want to keep your tables as simple as you can.

#7. Enable Resizable Text That Doesn’t Break Your Site
Most devices and browsers will enable users to resize text, which can be helpful for those with visual impairments. However, if you don’t build your site to support this feature, resizing text could break your design or make it difficult to interact with your site.

#8. Avoid Automatic Media and Navigation
Automatically-playing media files have been a bane of internet users since the days of MySpace. As annoying as it can be to have music or videos start when a page loads, this is an even bigger issue in terms of accessibility.

#9. Create Content With Accessibility in Mind
Finally, we come to the core of your site: its content. While designing your site for accessibility is hugely important, you should bear the same considerations in mind when creating content.

Web Content Accessibility Matters
Making sure your site is welcoming to as many people as possible should be a top priority. There’s no reason to exclude anybody, especially since it’s relatively easy to avoid doing so. Not only will your users thank you, but you’ll also likely see benefits in the form of increased traffic and conversions.

Thank you for joining us, for more helpful tips on how to build and grow your website, visit our YouTube channel. We’ll be waiting for you!