5 Top Tips For Making Your Site Accessible

These days, if you want to maximise your profits and reduce the chances of alienating entire demographics, you need to make sure that you prioritise accessibility, whether that’s for your website, your services or your products.

But what do we mean when we say ‘accessibility’ in reference to your digital presence, more specifically your business website?

Quite simply, it means making sure that your site can be used by as many different people as possible – so it would be a good idea to sit down in front of your website now to see if people with learning difficulties, impaired vision, deafness and so on would have problems using it on a day-to-day basis.

Make no mistake – this is no small undertaking and it might be quite some time before you’re happy with the usability of your site and satisfied that you’ve done all you can to make sure that the design and functions of your website (including the likes of navigation, content and layout) are accessible to all.

How to make websites accessible

An EU directive brought in back in 2018 requires all public sector sites and applications to be accessible, but those in the private sector would be well advised to follow these regulations as well.

Firstly, carry out an audit of your site to see what pages you should focus on first, starting with the pages that see the most traffic. Once you’ve worked out where to direct your efforts, you can take a look at the page itself to see what changes need to be made.

For example, it might be that the content on the page is hard for those with visual impairments to read. Can you see any text that could be tricky to decipher if there isn’t contrast against the background? For example, when white text appears against a bright background or a similar colour, it can be very difficult to see what it says.

Something else you could consider is the hierarchy of the content on your site, as someone with attention deficit issues could find it hard to navigate their way around the page unless the design helps to guide them.

Make sure your web pages are free from clutter and that you’re using the likes of headings and white space intuitively so people can make their way around your site with ease.

Something else to focus on is making sure your site works without the use of a mouse. There are all sorts of assistive technologies out there that are keyboard-only, so make sure all of the most important features of your site can be accessed using a keyboard and nothing else.

If you’d like to find out even more steps you can take to make your site more accessible, get in touch with us today.

If you’re looking for help with web design in Marlow, or want to find out how Crisp can help you grow your digital revenue please contact us here or take our Digital Scorecard and find out how you can get better today.