Tips for Making Your Website Accessible

Web Accessibility Overview

• Web accessibility refers to the inclusive practice of making websites usable for people of all abilities and disabilities.
• Well designed and developed sites provide all users access to information and functionality.
• The assistive needs that web accessibility attempts to address include:
  • Visual
  • Motor / Mobility
  • Auditory
  • Cognitive / Intellectual

Accessibility Guidelines

• Ensure that documents are clear and simple.
• Do not rely on color alone.
  • When your website relies heavily on color, it’s difficult or even impossible for some visitors with color blindness and color vision deficiency to parse the information on it. Color accessibility helps lower or remove the barrier to entry for those users.
• Provide clear navigation mechanisms.
  • Navigations should be simple and consistent.  For example, when building a page, using the appropriate header tags, such as <h2> and <h3>, helps visitors using assistive technology understand the layout of the page and the separation of sections.
• Use hyperlinking and markups properly.
  • Ensure that hyperlinks and image links clearly state where the user will go or what will be accomplished when clicked.  Links should describe the linked page and make sense if read out of context – avoid using dated linking approaches such as “Click Here” or “Read More”.
  • Hyperlinks should never be made bold. The problem with making links bold is that they look like strongly emphasized text, rather than links – which generally translates into less engagement with the target content.
• Provide equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content.
  • Transcriptions should be provided for any video or audio content.
• Each graphic should have an alt attribute (alt text).

Images and Graphics

• Screen readers do not read graphics.  Without alt attributes they will read file names or path names, which can be confusing.
• Screen readers cannot read images of text.
• Images of text also tend to pixelate when enlarged.
• Text in images needs to be put into the alt attribute.
•  Alt attributes should be clear and concise, describing the purpose of the image.

Alternative Text Descriptions

• Describe the image so that its purpose will be clear.
• Address the information gathering questions of ‘who, what, and where’.
• Keep your description neutral and informative.
• User proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
• Avoid acronyms and symbols.

Writing Good Alt Text

• Imagine you are on an audio-only call with someone, describing the image to them.
• Most images can be described in one sentence.
• Images of individuals simply need a name (i.e. ‘Abraham Lincoln’).
• If an image is purely decorative, using a null attribute (i.e. alt="" ) indicates to assistive technology that the image can be safely ignored.

Video Captions

• Captions are a text form of audio information in video and animations. This includes the words that are spoken, who is speaking when it is not evident, and important sounds like music, laughter, and noises.
• Captions must be synchronized with the visual content to contextualize them.
• Captions can be autogenerated in some media players, however the timing and accuracy of these captions should always be verified.
• Captions refers to when the text is the same language as the spoken audio, and Subtitles refers to when the spoken audio is translated in text in another language.

Who depends on this feature?

• People who are deaf and cannot hear the audio.
• People who are hard of hearing and cannot hear some of the content.
• People with cognitive and learning disabilities who need to see and hear the content to better understand it.

What are the additional benefits?

• Content can be used in loud environments where you cannot hear the audio.
• Content can be used in silent environments where you cannot turn on sound.
• Content can be better understood by people hearing and seeing the information, for example, people who are less fluent in the language spoken.
• Content can be read rather than watched, which is easier and quicker for some people.
• Content in text form, such as caption files and transcripts, can be better indexed by search engines.