Use of simple techniques and following some important guidelines suffice in making a website accessible enough to a wide range of audience rather than using complex techniques, putting accessible content or writing more than sufficient description of meta data that leads to people’s ‘give up’ attitude. An effective website requires techniques and skills, usability of a website can be determined by testing which is somewhere also a part of accessibility this is why accessibility is considered to be one of the most important things when developing a website. Accessibility is concerned with making your website accessible to all visitors who want to visit it regardless of being disabled. Web accessibility allows different categories to access a website:
- People with physical, visual or hearing disabilities.
- People who are technologically limited.
- People using mobile devices.
Thus, the term web accessibility is considered to be a little technical. Below is mentioned a list of tips for making a website accessible. However the list is too long to mention completely thus we are here with some of the important ones to consider.
Make User Friendly and Interactive Elements Highlighted
This is helpful for the people who are not able to use device like mouse to point something on a web page. Regardless of disabilities, most of the users will appreciate it and assume that the most important elements are easy to find.
Simplicity Leads to More Interaction
Here simplicity is all about writing that should be precise and readable. It’s a fact that people tend to comprehend the things well by reading rather than listening. So, make your writing as simple as possible so that visually challenged people who are audio dependent could grasp the things easily.
Make Use of Screen Reading Software
Screen reading software is helpful for the users with visual disabilities or one eyed. It’s good to check if your software is working well. In order to check the software, you need to turn off the system and run the software, if you find it gibberish, make changes.
Compatibility of Stylesheets
Make sure that your website is compatible with the different fonts and font sizes. People with sight problems resize fonts according to their ability on regular basis.
Put Good Combination of Text and Background Colors
Putting a high contrast color combination is easy and good to catch for the people who are not visually challenged. So make a good combination of text and background colors. For example it’s doesn’t make sense setting white text color on a light background color.
Create Skip Navigation
Creating skip navigation leads to skip to the main content of page. This is especially for the people who can’t use mouse to skip the list of links. Skip navigation is a link at the top of the page that takes visitors to the main content when clicked once.
Textual Descriptions
Always put a textual description on non text elements except design graphics and non spacer images using <alt> tag. Explaining everything with the help of words is appreciated by users.
Knowledge of CSS Attributes
Knowledge about CSS attributes is must to make a website effective. CSS attributes such as ‘id’ and ‘class’ must be used correctly otherwise will fail to do for what they are used. You can use id only once at a page and class multiple times. Repetitive use of id at one page results in unexpected behaviour in different browsers.
