The Guide How to Make Your Website More Accessible

We want to start with remaindering a well known fact: the right to access information is acknowledged by the United Nations (U.N.). Most people think that this phrase means that we are free to access the information whatever we want and nobody can prevent us from this. That concerns only rights. According to somebody’s mind, some information is inaccessible not due to government request. There are a lot of cases when people unwillingly prevent others from accessing the information. This happens because some people cannot receive the info in the form it comes. If you haven’t caught the thing we are talking about, please be patient and we would return to this question a bit later.

Web accessibility - what is this?

‘Web accessibility refers to the inclusive practice of making websites usable by people of all abilities and disabilities. When sites are correctly designed, developed and edited, all users can have equal access to information and functionality.’

This definition is offered by Wikipedia about web accessibility and we find it to be complete enough and easy to understand.

The web was meant to be functional for everybody. Under the word "everybody" we meant all of us notwithstanding physical and mental abilities, hardware, software preferences, language, culture and location we posses. So when everything works as expected, all people should have an ability to enjoy all things that are offered in the web.

The greatest advantage of the web is that it removes all cultural, linguistic, physical borders. It helps people to connect and stay in contact all over the world in spite of all boundaries.

Therefore, when due to some defects in design or programming part somebody is stand off the web, the main purpose of this essence is destroyed.

Who can say that any of us has the right to keep information from others? Wouldn’t it remind the time of totalitarianism? Definitely it is so.

How an accessible website looks like?

There are a lot of nuances that make a site accessible. The main idea is to suggest solutions for everybody. The website is considered to be more accessible if people with limited capacities can understand and navigate through it. Web accessibility comes over all disabilities that can influence the access to the Web; here belong visual, auditory, linguistic, physical, cognitive, and neurological disabilities.

Why accessible Website is desirable?

We can show you three main reasons:

According to the U.N., a human being has a right to access information and communication technologies, including the Web.

Accessibility supports social integration.

Making a Website accessible provides a strong business opportunity.

How to make your website accessible?

Lets see the ways of making the site accessible for everybody.

Visual accessibility.

There is a wide spectrum of visual impairments that can influence the perception process, including blindness, various common types of poor vision and poor eyesight, and various types of color blindness. All those who are suffering from these impairments need a help to access a Website. For instance, your Website can be developed with the help of semantically meaningful HTML, adding textual equivalents to images and providing links with meaningful names.

Implementing all these things can help blind users to receive the information, using text-to-speech software and/or text-to-Braille hardware.

One more helpful thing is to make sure that all text and images are large enough or they can be enlarged as well. This will help blind users to read and percept the info you offer in your content. Web links can be underlined or somehow differentiated from other content without using coloring themes. In this case color blind users will have an ability to find and click on them.

Motor accessibility

There are also people who cannot use a computer mouse. This may happen because of difficulties or inability to use hands, including tremors, muscle slowness, loss of good muscle control due to various conditions. This problem also concerns old users with limited fine motor control. And accessible website implies the ability of navigation without a mouse, keyboard can be used instead.

In this case people with disabilities can use adjuvant technologies that simulate the keyboard, such as speech input.

One more helpful thing is to make sure that all clickable links and areas are large or can be enlarged; this feature can help users, who cannot control a mouse with accuracy, to navigate and enjoy the site.

Auditory accessibility.

It’s evident that deaf people cannot hear audio files. That’s why you can help them to percept audio information in other way, for example by using a text transcript. This feature will make the audio information available for deaf or hard of hearing people.

These transcripts are easy in implementation for developers and don’t require much money to be spent. Another way is to provide video files with subtitles or with a sign language version available.

Accessibility for users who have predisposition to seizures.

Seizures can be caused by visual strobe or flashing effects. If you want to adapt all visitors of your site, who may suffer from seizures, you should be sure that flash effects are excluded or made optional. Thus users prone to seizures caused by these effects will not be compromised.

Accessibility for users who are cognitively or intellectually challenged.

We don’t mean that you have to build your entire site in the way people challenged in this manner can use and understand it. But some part of your content can be written in simple language with instructional diagrams and animations. Such changes will help users with dyslexia and learning difficulties to understand the content of your site.

Only a few guidelines how to make your site accessible are present. This is a very hard work, but we hope it is a thing worth doing.

If you cannot believe in the humanitarian aspect of this idea, you leastwise have to take into consideration the business end of the issue. People that need such accessibility features compose a good market for advertisers and people offering services. You cannot afford yourself to lose potential clients and users, because you haven’t implemented basic facilities of accessibility.

It concerns not only denying people impaired in one or another way to access your website, it also concerns denying the increasing of users and traffic. We consider it to be worth taking into consideration.

I am Hawk Miller from Ukraine, Blogging and internet R&D is my passion. I provide readymade Flash website templates for websites for their better look.

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