Accessibility means the ability to ensure your website is accessible to people with visual problems as well as other disabilities.
According to research, 25 percent of the adult population in the United States live with disabilities. This means that most of them use screen readers and other assistive technologies to browse the internet.
As such, you should make it one of your top priorities that such people are able to access your website.
Unfortunately, most WordPress development services and website owners do not pay much attention to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. This often makes life difficult for people with different kinds of disabilities.
Below are 7 ways to make your WordPress website accessible:
1. Use alt texts in all your images
Alt texts are HTML attributes associated with images. Their main purpose is to describe an image used in your website. An alt text basically serves as a replacement for an image in case the image fails to load. It is also used by search engine bots and careen readers to understand the content of an image or photo.
Using alt texts on your images helps people with visual impairments as well as search engine crawlers to understand the meaning of the images found on your website.
2. Choose your colors wisely
There are different kinds of visual impairments. They include retinitis, glaucoma, cataract, diabetic retinopathy, and pigmentosa. All these visual conditions those affected to have negative sensitivity to color contrasts.
As such, you need to ensure that you don’t use too similar colors on your website. According to AudioEye, using dark colors with a lighter background can help a lot.
3. Display your site title and tagline
Most themes give you a chance to upload a custom header image – giving you a perfect visual way to display information on your website. However, not all themes support alternative text. Something that can be a challenge for people with visual disabilities. Rather than showing your site title and tagline in a header image, indicate your site title and tagline as texts.
4. Avoid small fonts
It is obvious that people with poor visual will have problems reading small text sizes. That’s why you should use recommended font size when creating content for your website. Other than making your digital content across devices, CTA and large fonts are a perfect choice for conversion.
5. Make your multimedia accessible
Audio, video and other multimedia materials are vital in offering a high level of user experience. You should therefore ensure that such elements are well displayed and accessible to all uses.
6. Allow keyboard navigation
According to the World Health Organization, more than 200 million people suffer from different types of visual impairments. This means that a majority of them can’t use a mouse to navigate a website. As such, you should create your website in a manner that allows users to navigate without necessarily using a mouse.
7. Use a WordPress accessibility plugin
This is also a great way of making your WordPress website accessible. There are several WordPress accessibility plugins you can use to ensure that everyone can access your website.
In general, the importance of website accessibility cannot be overemphasized.