Marketers worldwide work effortlessly to give a good user experience. They focus on personalization, site speed, and so many factors that improve user experience. But some people experience the world differently from an average human being.
Website Accessibility is all about making it easy for disabled people to access the web. Designing sites to accommodate disabled people improves your brand reputation and trustworthiness. It also increases your rankings, as it helps the crawlers to scan easily.
Website designing companies are now more inclined towards adopting designs with a user-friendly interface and interactive layout. Considering that better user experience and appealing web design are the keys to the success of any website development company, it becomes important to focus on some of the latest website designing trends that are trending.
Before you design a site, you should know what you are trying to achieve.
The WCAG Guidelines for web designers cover a wide range of disabilities. The list is not exhaustive, but it includes:
- Blindness and low vision
- Deafness and Hearing loss
- Dexterity
- Speech disabilities
- Sensory disorders
- Cognitive and learning disabilities
It aims to make digital products accessible for people with disabilities. Some of the digital products are web, ePub, PDF, and mobile apps.
Principles for Web Accessibility
The WCAG Guidelines give four principles for designers. Keeping these principles in mind will help designers to design for accessibility. Speak about this to your website design company before you start designing.
- Perceivable
Everything on your site should be easily perceivable. The information should be easily perceived and recognized by the senses. Generally speaking, people use the sense of sight to read the text.
But not everyone is gifted with eyesight. There are visually challenged people in the world. So, it’s upon you to provide them with alternative ways to engage.
For visually challenged people, convert the text into audio. Similarly, you have to design for every other disability too. A digital marketing company in India can help you design your site for accessibility.
- Operable
Ensures that users find it easy to navigate through your site. You have to help them find the content they are looking for. Links can help you guide them to related content.
You also should provide enough time for users to consume content. Provide exemptions for disabled people. You can create custom time limits for them.
- Understandable
Focus on enhancing the readability of the site. Make sure that you use the right fonts and color contrasts.
Use simple words and provide definitions for ambiguous words. People have different learning styles. So, use different content types like audio, videos, and pictures.
- Robust
People access your site from different devices. Laptops, tablets, smartphones are a few of them. They also use various operating systems and browsers. Your website should work perfectly for all of them. So, give them more options for customization.
Here are some areas you should focus on:
Choose Colours Carefully:
Some people have colour blindness. They can perceive specific colours in different ways. So, you should pick your colours carefully when designing a site.
The most common form is red-green colourblindness. If you count on these colours to communicate your message, you are at a disadvantage.
On the other hand, using different colors can enhance readability. It can highlight certain essential areas. So keep both groups of people in mind.
Provide enough contrast between the front part and the background. Texts, icons, and borders should be visible.
You can have several tools to help you. Toptal’s Colour Filter shows you how people with color blindness will perceive different colors. TPGi’s Contrast Analyzer helps you check the color ratio. You can get the services of a website design company to pick the right colors.
Keyboard Navigation:
Some people have motor disabilities. They can’t use a mouse or trackpad. So design your site so that they can use the Tab key to move from one thing to another.
The tab order should be the same as the visual order. The arrow keys will help them scroll up and down the page.
Use anchor links to break down long content. The users should find it easy to skip to the sections they want. Add “skip to main content” at the top. It will help them go straight to the main content.
You should also test the web page yourself. Use the keyboard alone to see if you can navigate the site without a mouse. A digital marketing company in India can help you with keyboard navigation.
Unconventional scrolling: Some web design companies prefer the horizontal scroll at the top of the websites, thus, lending an altogether different browsing experience.
Including gradients: Logos define a brand. As some companies realise how changing colours or designs or inducing bright colours can change the look of a brand altogether. This is one of the best Website development factors that works wonders for websites conversions and traffic.
Rolling animations: The idea is to keep adding interesting content coupled with innovative web design that will not only keep viewers glued to the site but encourage them to come back for more.
Scroll controlled animations: Messages shared through animated figures lend a different charm to the website. This web designing trend allows increased page views and engagement. If done properly, using scroll-controlled animations can be an effective way to increase sales leads and conversion ratio.
Multiple coloured branding: Colours have a soothing effect in addition to garnering sufficient interest. That is why brands are adopting and including bright colours in their images and logos. The intelligently created web design inspires customers to navigate the site, use of multiple colours in brand logos and on the page ensure continuing customers’ attention.
Use Headings to Organize Content:
Headers help you to add more structure to your content. It makes it easy to understand what your content is all about. Users will read the headlines to see what you are trying to say.
Headers help visually challenged people navigate your content. It also makes it easier for search engines to scan your content. They improve internal linking and hence improve the rankings.
Your site should have only one H1 header. The H1 header is the page title, and the subheadings are H2.
Further subheadings will use H3 and so on. Make sure that you follow this order. It is essential for site navigation. If you skip heading levels, users will feel that you have left something.
Provide Textual Alternatives for Video and Images:
Videos and pictures will help people who find it hard to read text. They can make it easy to comprehend the text.
But you should provide text alternatives for multimedia content. Media content can fail to load. Perhaps some users will not be in a situation to play audio.
Use textual captions for images to help people identify pictures. The alt text should be precise and convey the meaning in a few words.
Use captions in videos to help people with hearing disabilities. For blind users, you should provide audio versions.
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