It is easy to get overwhelmed by the need for an accessible website. What does this mean? What will it mean?

Website accessibility is something we all want. However, it’s okay to start small and not rush to make it happen.

Accessible websites are rapidly becoming the norm, which is logical considering approximately 15% of the world’s population have some form of disability. What standards should your website adhere to to be considered accessible?

1: Review Your Content

For people with disabilities, accessibility is especially important.

• visual impairments
• hearing impairments
• Motor skills or physical disabilities
• photosensitive seizures
• Cognitive disabilities such as dementia or dyslexia are known as cognitive disabilities.

Content plays a major role in this. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 or WCAG 2.1 were created. A user’s interaction with a website is influenced by video and its written content. Navigating a website can be difficult if you have visual or hearing impairments.

You might think your website is perfect without any tests. In 2022, 96.8% of home pages were subject to WCAG 2 failures.

Make it simpler by using:

• Avoid confusing the reader with idioms and figures of speech. Use simple language.
• All relevant images can be given alt text
• Links can be enhanced with descriptive and easy-to-understand texts
• Subtitles and a transcript are available for videos

2: How good is your HTML?

Websites can be beautiful and performant, but they still need to follow bad HTML practices. This means that screen readers and Google will have a hard time reading the website. Google is one of the major players in this shift towards accessible websites. It will often penalize websites with too much ‘bad’ or confusing code.

Good HTML practices are simple and straightforward to use as a guideline for web development. Text styles are an example: Use more than color to indicate differences in a style. Your HTML links should be descriptive. Links should always use the ‘a attribute and have the href attribute.

The A11Y Project checklist can measure how accessible your website is. Validating your code is the only way to know for sure. Rocket Validator is the tool that Dux uses for validating the accessibility of their websites.

3: Does your website design do more than looking nice?

Colours: This is the first thing people think about when it comes to website accessibility. Yet, it is the most frequent accessibility issue across websites. 83.9% of home pages have text contrast lower than WCAG 2 AA standards.

Your website’s colour scheme should be consistent, purposeful, and acceptable in contrast. Here are the AA guidelines for accessibility testing.

Another element that can make or break a website accessible is the fonts. Fonts should be easy to read and easily understood.

4: What’s your Heading Structure?

You might be familiar about SEO headings. Headings are also crucial for accessibility. Surprisingly, almost 10% of websites do not have headings.

Everyone should be familiar with the following rules regarding heading structure:

• Every page should only have one H1.
• Heading elements must be in a logical order. They should not be used for visual design purposes. Use a CSS class if you have to use a particular visual element.
• As with the previous, do not skip the heading levels. It confuses the reader.

5: Do What Makes Sense If You’re in Doubt?

Accessibility issues can be easily identified if you are able to identify what you’re looking at. They might be obvious to you, but you don’t understand whysomething bothers. It’s dark text against a dark background. You are squinting at your brightness button trying to figure it out. This is an example of poor accessibility.

It’s not a problem for many people. It can prevent people with vision impairments from using a website, and it can also make it difficult to navigate the internet.