Best website accessibility practices to remember

Accessibility is important everywhere. Businesses, brands, and companies that are accessible to each potential user and customer alike are present and in good spirits. They are on the good side of the road.

Accessibility is often overlooked despite its brilliance. Accessibility has numerous benefits in search engine optimization (SEO), user interface (UI), user experience (UX), and other areas with proven benefits.

A website can isolate a lot of users if it does not optimize for accessibility. Anyone having cognitive, hearing, visual, or other problems will be left out. This is why following the best practices in optimizing website accessibility is compulsory.

How many people around the world are living with an impairment?

According to professionals from a web design company in Dubai, almost 16% of the global population is living with an impairment. Taking the needed measures to reduce disability and helping people access a website widens the audience and improves visibility. It even improves the website’s compliance and usability.

Understanding web accessibility

Web accessibility pertains to designing and developing websites catering to all sorts of users, particularly ones with impairments. This helps them easily navigate those sites and interact with them.

It is beyond making a delightful customer journey and wonderful customer experience (CX). It is about ensuring everyone having equal access to the internet, websites, and their content despite their abilities.

Web accessibility has its foundations in the early days of the Internet being developed. It gained traction during the late 90s with due thanks to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) helped develop those rules. These guidelines helped set the standard to ensure websites are accessible to everyone, especially the differently abled.

Do countries have legislation and requirements for websites and their degree of accessibility?

A lot of countries around the world have legal and state-legislated requirements for accessibility to the web. The United States has the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) while Canada’s accessibility guidelines are led by the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA). They both mandate that websites should be accessible to avert any legal hurdles, issues, and penalties.

Examples of requirements are:

Addition of alt text to images.
Providing captions for both audio and video content (subtitles).
Make sure keyboard users have full navigation facilities.

To what degree is website accessibility absolutely necessary?

Web accessibility should not be taken for granted. It helps ensure every man, woman, and child can access and interact with the web and digital content, irrespective of their ability and orientation. People with disabilities usually face a myriad of challenges when it comes to using the web. It can lead them to face exclusion from the following that others take for granted:

Fundamental Services.
Information.
Equal opportunities.

A lot of differently abled people are caught in the digital divide. This kind of divide is colloquially defined as the gap between those having access to all sorts of tech on the net and those who lack access.

The divide is more visible for individuals with disabilities. The lack of accessible websites worsens the divide. This leaves millions of users without proper access to information, education, and fundamental services, such as healthcare, banking, financial services, and shopping.

What kind of disabilities make website access a channel?

Here are the kinds of disabilities that make website access quite a challenge:

Vision impairment: 2.2 billion people on the planet have vision problems and impairments. Blind users and those with low vision cannot interpret content without screen readers. Poor color contrast can hinder color-blind individuals.
Hearing impairment: Individuals having hearing impairments can miss out on key information when videos do not have subtitles or transcripts.
Motor Skill Problems: Users with limited mobility can find it hard to navigate websites that rely a lot on mouse interaction in the face of keyboard alternatives.
Cognitive problems: Complicated layouts, inconsistent navigation, and excessive information can overwhelm users with ADHD, and memory issues.
Learning issues: Users having dyslexia or relevant conditions can have trouble reading poorly written text or content having visual clarity.

Improving website accessibility through best practices

Improving a website’s accessibility can ensure users receive a more inclusive experience. Apart from deploying AI in web development, implementing best practices in terms of accessibility will help the site comply with legal standards but also amplify usability for a more diverse audience.

Hence, they are as under: