7 ways to boost your website accessibility
You’ve got a website and you’ve started adding content.
But building great content is rarely as simple as it seems. Understanding accessible practices is the cornerstone of producing successful, far-reaching content your customers will love.
Let’s take a closer look at web accessibility and find out how to implement it on your website!
What is accessibility?
Accessibility is about making your site more user-friendly. There are lots of reasons a potential customer might struggle to use your site.
They could be:
Living with a disability
Using unreliable Wi-Fi
Not very digitally savvy.
Allowing everyone the same access to your content boosts its longevity; it also supports social inclusion.
Your visitors should enjoy the experience of watching a video or navigating through your website. Companies often unintentionally exclude individuals who might gain value from their content, and first impressions count!
The trick is ensuring your website turns clicks into customers. Here’s how.
1. Optimise your colour choices
More than 3 million people in the UK alone are colour blind, so it’s vital not to rely solely on colour when conveying your messaging.
Websites often use bright shades to hide flaws. This can cause readability issues for colour blind users, who struggle to read the text.
Including a greyscale option to your website will help you identify whether your content has the same impact, regardless of the colour scheme used. Seeing whether your site ‘holds up’ without its standard colour scheme can be very useful during the design process!
The colour blindness simulator is a handy tool for getting to grips with the fundamentals of being a colour-blind web user.
2. Use text-to-speech
Sight difficulties make browsing the web more difficult. While larger text sometimes makes things easier, text to speech is a must-have addition to accessible websites.
This helpful tool has other uses, too. It can enable people who are learning a new language, suffer from dyslexia or have literacy difficulties to understand the copy on your webpage. There is a burning need for text-to-speech to become a mainstream feature of accessible websites, as it helps alleviate a multitude of commonplace accessibility issues.
Using text-to-speech also gives the viewer a chance to decide how they digest the content. This can lead to longer time spent on your website and more opportunities for engagement, so it’s a win-win situation!
3. Watch your load times
Not everyone has access to a fast internet connection. This creates a barrier for users trying to access heavy load websites or high-quality videos and images. It also impacts the success of a website, with users averaging a 2-second wait time before abandoning the page.
Fast load speeds will help propel your company’s website to the top of search engines; loading time is the most important factor when ranking websites. To further highlight the impact, if your website loads within 2 seconds, then it is faster than roughly 75% of websites currently on the internet. That means you’re already better than 75% of the competition!
A slow website is an inefficient website. You don’t want to limit who can access the site or content. Choice goes a long way, so offering your content in different quality levels can help users choose the right settings for their situation.
Read more about how website loading time affects your Google ranking in this blog post about Core Web Vitals.
4. Use the dark (night) theme
Not quite Batman, but just as effective! Using dark themes (as opposed to light themes) reduces the amount of blue light emitted from screens.
This small move also alleviates eye strain, providing a more enjoyable reading experience and encouraging visitors to stay on your site. The dark theme is an underdog but has high levels of popularity amongst web users.
According to a Twitter poll, 90% of people prefer the dark theme. Experts have also argued it can help people who struggle with light sensitivity or visual impairment.
5. Add alt text for images
This one is easy to implement! Alt text (alternative text) for images adds a description to each photo, so if it can’t be viewed – whether due to loading issues or visual impairment – the user can still find out what the image is.
Descriptive alt text is very helpful for boosting accessibility. It does much more than simply act as a placeholder for your images! Alt text also boosts SEO, which helps Google sort the website by keywords used.
As a bonus, alt text synergises well with text-to-speech, allowing for the image to be described properly to someone who is visually impaired.
6. Signpost clearly
Navigating a website should be user-friendly. Clear and descriptive signposting can help your visitors browse with ease! If the user is visually impaired, non-descriptive enticements to ‘Click here!’ are ineffective.
Choose descriptive text and calls to action which advise the user clearly, such as: ‘Contact us to find out more.’
This ensures your users understand each link and where clicking it will take them.
7. Don’t lose your head(ers)
The structure of your content and the headings you use can either improve or impair accessibility. Headings break up big portions of text, helping the user to digest the information more easily.
Crucially, clear headers aid technology such as screen readers in breaking and interpreting all the different sections of the webpage. Giving the user access to the relevant information and sections is another vital element of accessible design and content creation.
Focus on improving the flow of your content and increasing readability at each stage. It might take a little getting used to, but practice makes perfect.
Accessibility is a big topic to tackle in just one blog post, but hopefully you now have enough insight into why you should prioritise social inclusion for the benefit of both user and company.
Take a look at this handy guide to find out more.
This piece was written by one of the students on our second Sookio Bootcamp, a week of remote work experience for 20 young marketers. Read the other blog posts about shock advertising and the benefits of having introverts on your creative team.