As a business owner, you’ve probably invested a fair amount of time, effort, and money into creating a professional and user-friendly website that works to attract customers to your company. You may even take great pride in just how engaging your site is, and what a great job it does at reflecting the products and services that your company offers. But here’s a question for you, have you given any thought to making sure your website is accessible to all? The fact is that there are a fair amount of people that suffer from various disabilities that can make it hard to use and navigate a traditional website.
If you’re ready to take the steps necessary to make your website more accessible to everyone, and thereby potentially increase the traffic and your customers, these tips straight from the pros at accessiBe can prove to be essential.
Conduct an Audit on Your Website
What can be really telling is the results from an audit on your website. This is something that accessiBe offers its clients, and credits a lot of its success to. What this does is find all the areas you can improve upon so you can start to lay out a roadmap.
Offer Audio Descriptions
Do you have a lot of graphics or videos on your website? While these can be incredibly helpful to explain your products and services, and even show them in use, for those who are blind, this doesn’t help at all. As accessiBe explains, this is why audio descriptions of the videos are necessary. When it comes to images, you can include alt text, which is a description of the image you have posted. These two tips will help to open up your website to a lot more people.
Include Audio/Video Transcripts
Another way in which accessiBe encourages companies to make their website more accessible is to offer audio and video transcripts – which is the written text of what occurred in the audio or video file. This is excellent for anyone that may not be able to watch or listen, or who prefers to absorb information by print.
Make All Font Adjustable in Size
Another problem visitors can run into is reading the text on the screen. While they may be able to see it, the size of the font can make it difficult and impossible to read. This is why it’s important to give people the ability to increase the font size so it’s a more comfortable experience for them.
Think About Ease of Navigation and Enable Keyboard Access
Finally, there is the ease of navigation. For some people, the drop down menus, URLs, forms, anchor text, and calls to action may be very difficult to navigate and access, such as when using a Braille keyboard. This is why it’s so important to offer keyboard navigation. No-one should feel as though they are missing out on the interactive experience.
Regardless of the type of business or industry that you are in, the goal should always be to create a website that is engaging, professional, useful and, of course, accessible to all.