Introduction
“Accessibility for all, regardless of disability, is a paramount element of the internet.”
Everyone needs accessibility, no matter whether you are disabled or not! Technology and modern development in UI/UX have progressed a lot. Web accessibility is the new trend and is essential as everyone deserves to have access to the internet. Web accessibility helps individuals with disabilities perceive, understand, navigate, interact with, and contribute to the web.
User experience (UX) designers should make sure that all users have equal access to resources in this age where the internet is a necessary tool for creating web-based experiences. Developing a website which complies with all the nitty-gritty functions can be used and understood as well as accessed by people with a diverse range of visual, auditory, cognitive, and physical disabilities. In addition to that, it is also related to SEO. The SEO service providers’ recommendations are the most important factors for website elements, such as site structure, UX, and descriptions, which are influenced by those.
Worldwide, 285 million people are thought to have visual impairments, of which 246 million have low vision and 39 million are blind. In spite of having poor acuity (a vision that is not sharp), tunnel vision (only seeing the centre of the visual field), central field loss (only seeing the edges of the visual field), or clouded vision (people with low vision can still see colours).
Website Accessibility For The Visually Impaired
As we discussed above, the stats show how one can get benefits if our website has accessibility. Additionally, failing to include designs that provide assistance and ease of use for people with visual impairments would not be ethically fair or right.
There are a few effective considerations to make the website accessible, but before that, understanding the real problem that has been faced is necessary. Here we are addressing issues people with visual impairments experience when using the Web with suggestions. The recommendations demonstrate how we can significantly improve the lives of disabled people while boosting conversion rates by utilising best UX design practices, SEO, and the ins and outs of digital marketing.
Use Colours And Textures To Create Enough Contrast
Using tools like the Stark Sketch plugin, test colours to ensure they have the right contrast ratio for readability. Tools like this one test combinations of text colour and background colour while also taking text size into account. This can be achieved by following the standards and guidelines WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) has laid out.
Limit And Prioritize Color In The Interface
As more colours are added, this only gets more challenging for someone who is colour blind. Even a non-vision-impaired user will find it challenging to quickly identify key actions and links as more colours are added to a design interface.
“Adobe states that “Users can use Colour Universal Design (CUD) to proof images to make sure that graphical information is accurately communicated to people with various types of colour vision impairment, including people with colour blindness.”
Allow For Manual Font Size Adjustment.
These days, there are many ways to increase accessibility for people who are blind or visually impaired, such as using magnifying software and enabling text size customization in browser settings.
List of Website Contents for SEO & Accessibility
Title tags
There is no doubt that title tags have a lot of SEO potential. When title tags are carefully crafted and optimised, users may be more likely to click through to your website.
Screen readers are a type of assistive technology that enables users who are blind or visually impaired to hear text that is displayed on a computer screen, including headings, links, and tags. As the first thing, a screen-reader user hears when a page loads, title tags are crucial for accessibility. Title tags tell us what page we’re on and what pages are open. Incorporating relevant keywords that accurately describe the subject matter in title tags is also beneficial.
Headings
Another crucial field is headings, which offer a semantic structure for both screen readers and search engine bots that use them as anchors. Headers enable a screen reader to navigate a page. Consider it to be comparable to skimming a page.
Links
In relation to SEO, internal and external links can help with crawling, promotion, and engagement. Users and search bots use links to navigate through the web; links help to transfer value to the targeted page being linked and give more context to what the pages are about.
Link text is essential for accessibility because it is used as an anchor to navigate between pages. If a visitor chooses to click through, they must make it crystal clear what the next page is about.
Alt Text
When searching for significant, specific keyword phrases, alt text increases the likelihood of being found. However, there is a huge disconnect between how SEOs are currently creating alt text and where we need to be.
Keep in mind that accessibility, not SEO, is the main goal of alt text. Millions of screen reader users rely on this field to comprehend what’s in an image and navigate online graphics. As a recommendation, e-commerce websites might also profit from including illustrative alt text.
Multimedia
Another excellent method for people to consume information is through multimedia (such as podcasts and videos). Providing text versions of multimedia content gives search engines another way to find your content.
There are particular Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) compliance levels to follow and media alternatives that need to be included when it comes to accessibility, depending on the media being used and when (live versus pre-recorded).
Make Everyone’s Experience On The Internet More Enjoyable
The suggestions are not just the only list but just suggestions in the field to improve the SEO and Accessibility. The best digital marketing companies are not just those that help businesses rank their websites or increase conversion rates, but also improve users’ experiences.
Sticking to this list of recommendations and expanding seo services in this field is a wise decision today. Many websites are following this new path of making websites accessible for the disabled and visually impaired to increase their trustworthiness, effectiveness, and credibility as well as capture the market which was untouched.