Website accessibility is an issue of increasing importance. While the vast majority of websites today are not compliant, developers and designers are working with their clients to ensure better access for everyone, including those with disabilities. Here are 7 tips by BluesAndBullets editorial team about to create a website designing for building accessible websites:
1. Pay attention to color contrast
Color blindness affects 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women in the world. As people age, it gets more and more difficult to see and distinguish certain colors, which makes some content on websites illegible for the user. Thankfully there are some easy web-based tools to help when you are selecting your colors. Here are a few examples:
- WCAG Contrast Checker
- Google Chrome extension for color contrast
- Color Contrast Checker
- Accessible Colors
- Accessi Contrast Checker
2. Provide alternatives to non-text content
This is an easy win for creating an accessible website. Make sure to label all images in a simple but descriptive way to provide helpful information for users with screen readers. If the alt text doesn’t add anything new or useful, or if the image is for design appeal only, make it easy for screen readers to skip the image, and add an empty tag (alt=”).
In addition, provide text alternatives for video and audio media. The big players such as YouTube have some native tools to help with this, so you should take full advantage of them.
3. Enable “skip” for repeat content
This is important mostly for navigation and other content that repeats on each page. Imagine how annoying and time consuming it would be to have to tab through each navigation item on every single page of a website, before getting to the actual body content. If skip is enabled, it allows the user to bypass this repeat content and go right to the body.
4. Check to resize to 200%
Accessible websites need to be easily resized. This means, if you zoom in and set your browser up to 200%, your website design should still be fully visible, navigable and readable. Just as you would make your site responsive for smaller screens such as the phone or tablet, you want to it to react accurately to zooming in as well.
5. Label forms correctly
Make sure your field labels are descriptive and exist outside of each actual form field. Labels inside the field will disappear once the user starts typing. This often leaves people (disabled or not) unsure of the formatting of the content for the field.
How often have you received an error because you added a date as m/d/yy instead of mm/dd/yyyy, because the label describing the format disappeared once you started typing? This is an easy habit to follow and increases not only website accessibility, but also the overall user experience.
6. Structure your content
A large body of text is difficult and tedious to read and scan. Use different headings (H2, H3, etc), bullets and other page layout tools, to structure and break up your content in meaningful ways. This increases overall usability of your site, for a good user experience, and can even improve bootsnall marketing effectiveness. Be sure to provide a clear next step action for your user on each page as well.
7. Test your site using accessibility tools
Evaluate Website Accessibility as the o2group shows:
- Go through your site using voiceover (ideally on mobile)
- Use a screenreader
- Use your keyboard to tab through your site
You will immediately find missing content or functionality that is not accessible. Also, pay attention to superfluous alt text. Using “image” as the alt text for an image leads to poor user experience.
What should UI UX designer do?
UI/UX designers are essential players in the digital industry and have a vital role to play. They bridge the gap between a product’s users and its creators, creating digital experiences that are both easy to use and visually appealing. But what should UI/UX designers do to be successful?
The key is understanding user needs and expectations. Designers must put themselves in the customer’s shoes, taking into account their wants, needs, and how they interact with products on a daily basis.
This means researching customer behavior, developing customer personas, analyzing competitor products, keeping up with industry trends, and more Visual Design UX/UI. Once these insights are gathered, UI/UX designers can begin designing wireframes for websites or applications that meet user requirements while also satisfying business objectives.
You are a marketer who needs to collect qualitative feedback from your customers (like what they think about your product, or how they use it).
You need to collect a lot of responses in a short period of time.
Use Respondent best UX research tool, respondent, to easily create and distribute surveys that look great on any device!
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It may seem daunting, and this list is certainly not all-encompassing, but using these tips will get you well on your way to creating and maintaining an accessible website.