Optimising your small business website content for disabled users makes perfect business sense. This enables you to cater to a broader market audience while maintaining a positive brand image.
There would only be a hand full of web designers or business owners that would ever consider implementing accessibility features on most small business websites.
Some considerations of things that you can implement on your business website are listed below in the following sections, however you may find that your website is already very accessible if it addresses things like strong CTA (call to actions) and is mobile responsive, and uses the correct amount contrast and colour hues:
Visual elements like images can pose an accessibility challenge to blind users and those with low vision.
They mostly have to rely on assistive technologies such as Screen Readers.
Screen Readers are software applications that read the text on the screen and synthesize it as an audible voice.
But bear in mind that neither of these technologies can read images or the text embedded in the images.
So, you need to add Alt Text (alternative text) to describe your images to disabled users.
Make sure your description is clear and concise.
You can use alt attribute for brief descriptions and “Longdesc Tag” for longer descriptions. If you are unsure ask your web designer or check your CMS help.
Along with text size, think about your website colour and contrast. Some people with vision impairments can have low colour contrast sensitivity.
When designing your business web pages, make sure to have a high contrast between the foreground and background, such as yellow text on a black background & avoid using thin fonts as these can be difficult to read even for people who are not visually challenged.
Also avoid using any Scripts or CSS features that will prevent visually impaired users from increasing the contrast.
Just like the text size, colour contrast is also critical for call to actions like buttons.
While black text on a white background has the highest contrast for readability, you can also use a combination of other colours like yellow text on a blue background.
This can be even trickier to accommodate as there are a range of colour blindness types from red-green (Deuteranomaly) & Protanomaly which makes red look more green and less bright but protanopia and deuteranopia both makes the person unable to distinguish the difference between red and green at all.
Fortunately there are apps and software available for colour blind users to either install on their computers or smartphones. Windows 10 also has a setting for colour blind users and is worthwhile checking out.
What you can do is avoid using combinations like green text on red background and vice versa as these are hard to read especially for folks that are colour blind.
Videos and other multimedia components on your business website play an important role in increasing the user-engagement on your website.
While blind and visually-impaired users can’t see visuals, deaf users and those hard-of-hearing can’t hear audio.
You can provide text captions that synchronize with the video and audio tracks for users who are deaf or hard-of-hearing. You may want to consider uploading the videos to YouTube and then embedding the video on your website as YouTube already has some nice accessibility features built in for you that provided closed captions and video transcripts.
Screen readers can quickly and accurately read descriptive URLs, offering blind and visually-impaired users some context.
Meaningful descriptions also make it easier for the user to skip to the right content. For example, when describing the slug or link of the “About” page, keep the following in mind both for accessibility and SEO.
Avoid using anchor text like “Read More” or “Click Here” anywhere on the page, this is generally a bad idea for general user experience anyway. Also, don’t add links to images if they can’t support Alt Text.
ARIA stands for Accessible Rich Internet Applications. It helps you make changing content more accessible.
ARIA roles and attributes provide more information or context about a website element to screen readers and other assistive technologies.
You can add the ARIA role using a role=”” attribute.
However, only people with access to the web page source code and with the knowledge of ARIA and HTML5 can and should make these changes.
You should contact your local Canberra Web Designer for further details.
Online forms quite often use placeholder text to describe various form fields to save space. However, placeholder text is usually greyed out making it hard to read for visually impaired users because of low contrast.
It is also a non-label text, which means screen readers will usually skip over placeholder text. As a result, blind users won’t be able to read this text either.
What you can do instead of placeholder text is to use the
For the most part tables should only be used to present data and not used to layout other elements on a web page. Usually, screen readers will inform blind users of how many rows and columns a table has.
However, it is often difficult for screen readers to interpret the tabular data in the same way that matches the visual order. If you must create a table, use the correct headers for each row and column. You can also use HTML5 table captions to provide additional information contextually to your disabled users.
Creating an accessible website not only makes good business sense to encompass a broader market segment, it is also the right thing to do. So always keep the accessibility of your small business website in mind.
