The internet world is getting more and more advanced with each and every passing day. Internet has become one of the most effective, convenient and powerful resource of information. Websites have established as the easiest and useful mode of information exchange, overpowering the most of the conventional media channels such as the radio, newspaper and television. It is quite unfortunate that sometimes, the power and adaptability of web is not utilized properly to address the special needs of users.
There are many aspects which play significant role in improving the functionality and accessibility of website. If you hire the professional company offering creative web solutions, they will provide you with unique, eye-catching, easily accessible and highly functional websites by using simple, yet practical guidelines that will surely improve your websites accessibility. In fact, by implementing these guidelines, you will enhance the overall accessibility for all web users.
1. Color
While designing a website, first thing you need to pay attention is the color of the website as visitors will first notice the color scheme. Many people are suffering from color blindness of some form or other. Protanopia and Deuteranopia are the most common sorts of color blindness, and the people who are suffering from such problems find difficulty in distinguishing among red, green and other similar colors. A simple way of eliminating this issue is to test your website by using some of the free tools which are available online. Using a high color contrast can also be one of the intelligent ideas. This suggestion is not only for the color blind people, but it will also work for regular users. As per web accessibility guidelines maintaining 4:5:1 contrast ratio would be advisable. For usual text size, the best ratio would be 7:1. Preferably, the background should be black and white for text.
2. Links
Links are important part in the content we provide in the website. Make sure that the contextual links in your site are more eloquent. Many users with special requirements use screen readers and advanced screen readers provide their users with the option to navigate a web page by skipping through the links to get something that they are fascinated with. The user will only hear text in the link without thinking that what content it directs to. Thus, if all the user hears is “know more” or “click here” from the link, it becomes quite useless as it will not provide enough information like where they will be navigated to. A website with descriptive links i.e “click here to know more about this article” or “Learn more about our services” will be more accessible for special requirements.
3. Alternative Content
It is imperative to provide alternative content to your website users. The most vital principle of web accessibility is to deliver the content which is accessible for everyone irrespective of what specific requirements they have. There are many ways to do this. Perhaps, the simplest, yet critical ways of doing it is to provide text for non text content, for instance by using the HTML alt attribute and vice versa. Professional firms of website development provide the users with the ability to select larger fonts, higher contrast and zoom in and zoom out feature when viewing your site; it will ultimately enhance the accessibility of your site.
4. Navigation
In order to make navigation easily accessible, you need to consider few important points. One effective way is to use the main navigation at the beginning of the page so that the users don’t have to go through various links. Also, you can use skip navigation link in the page. It is always recommended to build a web page which is properly structured and relevant to navigate through. Also, important is the use of extra hierarchical indications that signify the changing degree of value in content by using adequate styling. This helps the user to differentiate between content, main headings and subheadings. By making the proper use of HTML markup CSS styling can be very easily done.
5. Testing
Testing your websites accessibility against huge and special needs of users is an amazing accomplishment. Nothing could be better than real user testing. Although, there are automated tools which are quite helpful in identifying the accessibility issues by analyzing code of your website. You can try out free web based accessibility tools to better check the website accessibility.
When we are taking about accessibility, it is always imperative to know the difference and relevance among usability and accessibility. For a site to be usable, it has to be accessible. For this reason, implementing or using accessibility measures for site which are recommended in this blog will be helpful to all your users, irrespective or not they have special requirements.
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