Make Your Website Accessible with these Tips
There are a millions of users out there and if we want to attract more of them to our site, there are some necessary steps which we must follow to ensure that site are being used by everyone. For this, accessibility is important which is not difficult to implement. All we need to understand the underlying issues which can make a site hard or impossible to use by certain people.
Here are some tips to apply and mistakes to avoid for making the site accessible:
Choose CMS that is supportive to accessibility: As there are many content management systems are available there to help us in building our website but we must choose a CMS that suits our needs and make sure it is accessible also. After that, we have to consult the theme’s documentation for notes on accessibility and tips for creating accessible content and layouts for that theme.
Use heading correctly: We should put our focus on using the correct and strategically heading (h1, h2, etc.) to navigate the well organized and easily interpreted content by screen readers. We should also make sure to adhere to correct order of headings and separate presentation from structure by using CSS.
Proper alternative texts for images: Alt text should be used for the images so that screen readers users could be able to understand the message conveyed by the use of images on the page. It is crucial for informative images such as infographics. The alt text should contain the message we want to convey through that image.
Give links unique and descriptive names: Whenever we include links in our content, we should use text that is able to properly describe where our link will go. Use of “Click here” is not a good idea as it is not descriptive and ineffective for the screen reader users. The most unique content of the link should be shown first.
Design forms for accessibility: If our form fields are not labeled properly, the screen reader user does not have the same cues available as the sighted user. For this, each field in our form should have a well positioned and descriptive label.
Use tables for tabular data: We should use tables for page layouts as they add additional verbosity to screen reader users. Whenever a screen reader goes through the table, he is informed that there is a table named ‘X” number of columns and rows and distracts from the content.
