5 Tips to Improve Your Business’ Web Accessibility
Optimizing your website to be inclusive to all individuals despite disabilities or other limitations and easy to navigate for all visitors makes your business more appealing and more likely to gain new users and a wider audience. Following these five steps to improving your web accessibility is sure to make your website and company stand out among competitors and garner the attention of more customers in the long run.
1. Structure and Organization with Headers
Organizing information or articles with clearly defined headings and subheadings as well as relevant titles that guide your audience to the articles and answers to their questions that they are looking for is key to making a site easy to navigate. It also makes for a higher retention rate among new users and ensures that you maintain their attention and possibly interest them in related articles or products featured on your website.
2. Simple and Easily Viewable Design and Colors
Avoiding using bright text, tiny fonts, and complicated web designs is important to make the process of visiting your site enjoyable and efficient for users. Making certain that you are clear and consistent in your use of navigation and menu and submenu structures throughout your website is equally as important, and at the same time, it is necessary to place more up-to-date content at the forefront of your site. Strategically placing contact information, new product information, FAQs, and other important links should be your primary goal when choosing a web design company.
3. Descriptive Alt-Text for Images
Adding alt-text is a key factor in optimizing web accessibility because it allows for screen readers and assistive technology to interpret images and provide information for those who are unable to view images. Alt-text is meant to be short yet descriptive to give readers an accurate and easy-to-understand gist of what an image represents for contextual purposes. Alt-text is supported by HTML, PDF, Word, and more.
4. Ensure Navigation Through Keyboard
Assistive technology works well with keyboards so ensuring that your website is navigable through keys such as “tab” and “enter” is essential when considering enhancing your web accessibility. Perform keyboard tests on your website to make certain that your tab key navigates through links and the enter key activates links. More information about keyboard accessibility can be found here.
5. Test Your Page on Mobile Devices
In the age of social media and, most importantly, surfing the web via mobile phones at any point in time, it is especially crucial that you test your site for mobile accessibility. Most people get their information through quick Google searches, so reviewing the usability of your site via multiple mobile devices including phones and tablets will increase your user base. You can also use automated tools like Google Analytics to accurately assess user experience and behavior as well as page speed and bounce rates.
Conclusion
These five tips are the best place to start optimizing your business’ site for increased accessibility that will both expand and further solidify your userbase. Taking them into consideration, you can go on to building your business’ online presence in the most effective way!
