Making your content accessible
Why does accessibility matter?
An accessible website means that it can be viewed by the widest audience possible. Accessibility not only refers to people with physical disabilities (such as blind users), but also people with cognitive, learning or motor skills disabilities, and people who access your site with mobile devices or old, outdated technology. Lastly, as mentioned previously, search engines can be considered disabled users in the sense that they can't' see your design or images or interact with your site.
Accessibility is important for a number of reasons:
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Ethical—being inclusive is the right thing to do and has a positive impact on how your audience perceives you or your organisation.
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Business—sites that can be used by everyone have a larger audience. They are more findable and therefore generate more traffic/business. Accessible sites are also easier to maintain, resulting in fewer ongoing costs.
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Legal—many governments require websites to comply with certain standards. Details depend on your country, however, typically the guidelines are based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C.)
Accessibility is not something you implement once and then have it. There is an infinite number of types of disability, platforms, devices, configurations, so you have to choose to what level you want to comply.
The more you know about your users, the better. Web stats, such as Google Analytics, can help you find out about your users' most frequently used browsers and operating systems. User research can help to learn more about how users with disabilities interact with the site - but that's costly and often not an option. Automated tools can help and are a useful first step as they look for all the obvious issues and generate a list of problems. However, it still requires a person to assess and interpret the results and make decisions about items flagged by the automated tools. For example, you can use an automated tool to check whether all your images have alternative text, but you as the editor of your site need to determine if the text in the alt attribute is descriptive and appropriate.
The following paragraphs describe some of the quick wins—things you can do easily to greatly increase the accessibility of your site.
Alternative text for images
When embedding images in your content, always provide alternative text that can serve as a placeholder in case the image itself cannot be displayed. Alternative text is often referred to as the "ALT tag", although that's not technically correct :-). Alternative text is important for those who cannot see the actual image, such as vision impaired users, people with text-only browsers, or search engine, and it should be meaningful and describe what the image shows.
In addition, you may also want to add title text for your image. Title text is for additional information about your image, such as the name of the photographer, or the date when it was taken. The title text appears as a tooltip when the user hovers over the image.
Headings and lists
Mark up your headings by selecting the right heading style from the Format dropdown. Using headings properly gives your content hierarchy and, for example, allows users with screen readers to skip ahead to the next heading. Note that Heading 1 will be the title of your page, and all lower-level headings should be nested properly (e.g., Heading 3 should be within a Heading 2 section, etc.)
If your content uses lists, select either bullets (unordered list) or numbers (ordered list) - don't use dashes or asterisks to mark up lists.
Links
When you insert a link, make sure your link text (the part of your content that's clickable) is meaningful and relates to the page you're linking to. Don't use "click here" or "read more" as they don't tell the user where your link is going. Think about what would make sense for someone who has the link text read out to them by a screen reader.
Alternative formats for media
If your site uses other media, such as Flash, audio or video content, document attachments or animations, make sure this content is accessible to users who can't see or hear it, or who don't have the software to view it. How exactly you do this will depend on the kind of content and how critical it is to your site and your users. Typical alternatives would be transcripts, summaries (for example, of PDF documents), captions (for videos), or text-only versions.
Tables and charts
If your site uses graphs to convey information, also provide text-based summaries that describe the information displayed in the graphs.
For tables, make sure you mark them up so that screen readers can interpret them correctly (for example, mark header rows/columns as such.) It's also a good idea to provide a text-based summary of the information contained in the table.