Key Takeaways
- Does your website adhere to the web accessibility guidelines?
- Adopting web content accessibility guidelines makes your website’s content much more accessible.
- Read to know why Web Accessibility is important for your Brand’s future.
In our digital era, Web Accessibility isn’t just a buzzword anymore!
It helps in defining the accessibility of a website and depicts the inclusive nature of web development services used to develop it.
Web Accessibility helps in ensuring that all the users, be they have disabilities, old age, injury or more can access the website in similar manner.
You might be wondering,
- What is Web accessibility?
- How can it be ensured for all?
- And the role played by web developers in Web Accessibility.
In this blog, we will dwell in the realm of Web Accessibility and its significance in SEO!
If you are a business owner, a web developer, a digital marketer, or a tech enthusiast, this blog will help your website become accessible to all!
A few facts about Web Accessibility
- The USA itself has 61 million differently abled users, while the world has 3 billion differently abled persons.
- In a recent study by Audio Eye, only 3% of the websites, across the globe, are accessible to all!
- 56% of the online images are not accessible to the visually impaired.
- 98% of the websites have at least one web page that isn’t accessible to all.
- Alt text or alternative text is missing in 60% of the online images.
Web Accessibility: The Understanding
Web Accessibility guarantees that a website will be accessible for all, be they visually, auditory, or any other type of disability!
It not only helps in covering the entire target audience but also makes the differently abled users feel cared for.
The Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, makes it a federal right of the differently abled users to be treated equally, be it in real life or online!
This includes disabilities like,
- Visual
- Auditory
- Physical
- Speech
- Cognitive
- Neurological
While Web accessibility focusses more on differently abled users, it also helps in making a website accessible to the elder generation, which might not be technically sound as well as the injured people!
Web Accessibility: The Importance
Web accessibility helps in making your website,
- Accessible to all users (differently abled, elderly, injured, and more)
- ADA compliant
- User preferred choice
- Top ranking on SERPs or search engine result pages (in terms of SEO)
- Reliable and Authoritative (in terms of SEO)
So not only does an accessible website become a user preferred choice but also gets an indirect SEO boost!
Web Accessibility: Compliance & Legal Requirements
In the USA, the ADA, or Americans with Disabilities Act, & Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act are mandatory compliances for any website so that it is accessible to all.
While in international markets, websites have to adhere to WCAG, or the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
Non-compliance will lead to,
- Fines
- Lawsuits
- Decreased user traffic
- Poor user experience or UX
- Poor SEO implementation
Here are the legal requirements and compliances for a website
- ADA and Section 508 in USA
- WCAG 2.1, Internationally
- Sharing accessible content upon request
- Regular audits to judge website accessibility and make corrections.
By adhering to these, your website is bound to have an exponential SEO ranking jump!
Web Accessibility: Common Barriers
The barriers like motor, cognitive, visual, auditory, or more disabilities become the common barriers for web accessibility!
Here are the few barriers that are common when it comes to hampered web accessibility:
- Inaccessible Navigation
If a user cannot access the Menus, buttons, links, and more via keyboard, then that website has poor navigation.
- Poor Colour Contrast
If the text and the background do not have contrasting colours, then the web content will be difficult to read not only for visually impaired users but for normal users as well.
- No Alt text
Alt text helps in describing images to users who are either fully or partially blind.
- No Captions & Transcripts
Videos and audios without cations and/or transcripts will guarantee that some users will not be able to understand them, be they normal or differently abled!
- Complex or Formal Language
If the language used on a website is too complex or formal, then the content will feel alien to most of the users who do not have that much proficiency!
As you can see, these barriers are not huge and can be curtailed with ease.
The role of Web Accessibility Consultants
Web Accessibility consultants are those skilled consultants that help in making a website accessible to all!
They possess SEO expertise, Web Accessibility experience and basic Web development know-how.
They carry out audits to provide recommendations and finally help in implementing these changes to ensure the best possible Web Accessibility.
Web Accessibility consultants also help in making a website user-friendly and boosting the overall SEO!
Web Accessibility: Is Your Website Accessible or Not?
Here is how you can easily evaluate if your website needs an accessibility makeover or not!
- Can blind and deaf users easily access your website?
- Can the website be accessed with various input methods like keyboards, and more?
- Can a student in 8th–10th grade understand your website’s content?
- Can your website work with assistive techs like screen readers and more?
We are quite sure that most of the websites will fail the test, and that’s why it’s a concerning issue!
Web Accessibility Testing Solutions
You can delegate the regular testing for web accessibility to some tools that are quite helpful.
They are,
- WAVE,
- AXE,
- Google Lighthouse, and
- UserWay
Manual testing always works but engages a valuable resource like a web accessibility consultant for a longer time!
Using a combination of both will guarantee the optimum accessibility check of a website.
Simply go through the following blog to make your website accessible in 7 steps!
Web Accessibility: Best Practices
If you keep web accessibility as an important feature during web development itself, then you will face a lesser web accessibility issue in the future!
Design inclusivity is one of the ways to ensure website design helps in maintaining and boosting accessibility of a website for all.
Here are some of the design-inclusive best practices to achieve Web Accessibility:
- Alt text usage on images, videos, and other visual content to help the visually challenged.
- Keyboard navigation and accessibility
- Clear and simple language
- Transcripts for audio and video content
- Color contrast on web pages
- Interactive links and buttons must be highlighted!
In case you have an e-commerce platform, then along with the above pointers you also use,
- Responsive Web Design
- Accessible Checkout process via keyboard friendly “Add to Cart” option
- Real world testing with Differently abled users to data via Accessible forms
- Display an accessibility statement visible to users stating adherence to the compliances in question.
- Ensure that your in-house and outsourced teams handled accessibility issues with utmost care.
- Integration capabilities for Social media and other important platforms
With these best practices, no one can stop your website from becoming the most accessible!
Web Accessibility & SEO
SEO or search engine optimization helps in getting a website ranked on top of the SERPs to get the maximum number of organic footfalls.
These digital footfalls help in declaring to the search engine like Google that the website in question is reliable and authoritative in their domain.
In short, SEO helps in garnering more online visibility and thus boost SERP ranking!
Web accessibility helps in making a website accessible to all the users, be they differently challenged, elderly, or injured!
If your website is accessible to them all,
- The target audience will be fully covered!
- The users that face accessing difficulties on competitors’ websites will switch to your website.
- There will be some dark social word-of-mouth publicities as well.
Or, in other words, Web accessibility will help in boosting the online visibility and thus improve SEO and SERP rankings!
Conclusion: Web accessibility is the future of website development!
If your brand has an accessible website, then it becomes more beneficial to the users and thus your business too!
Be it user experience, SEO ranking, holistic targeting, or ADA/WCAG compliance, the website will have it all and more by becoming accessible.
And thus, it is important to ask for website accessibility functionality while getting a new website developed itself.
But if you already have an existing website, then look for reliable web accessible consultants before the web accessibility becomes unavoidable!
Wildnet Technologies is a leading website and app development company in India that not only delivers top notch websites but also inculcates web accessibility in them via our Design and Development services!
If you would like to know more,
- AI-driven Web Development: Future of Website Development services
- Want Higher Performance with Remote Teams?
- Wildnet’s Digital Yum (our thought leadership’s weekly POV on the latest in the digital transformation industry)
Connect with us now at info@wildnettechnologies.com and make your website accessible!
FAQs
FAQ 1. What is meant by web accessibility?
Ans: A website is called accessible if it can be easily used by differently abled, old, and injured users.
FAQ 2. What are the 4 key principles of web accessibility?
Ans: The 4 principles of web accessibility are POUR,
- Perceivable
- Operable
- Understandable
- Robust
FAQ 3. What is an example of web accessibility?
Ans: The official website of the Government of the United Kingdom or UK allows keyboard usage and screen reading, among other web accessibility features.
It is a great example of web accessibility!
FAQ 4. Who needs web accessibility?
Ans: Any business that needs to do online interaction with its users in the USA and under the jurisdiction of WCAG internationally, needs web accessibility.
They need it to make their websites accessible to all users regardless of their differently abled nature.
FAQ 5. What are the benefits of web accessibility?
Ans: Here are the few benefits of web accessibility:
- All around coverage of the target audience
- ADA and Section 508 compliance in the USA and WCAG compliance in the rest of the world
- Word-of-mouth publicity via specially abled individuals’ communities
- Boosted organic footfall
- UGC opportunities
- SEO boost
- And more.
