Web Accessibility: Why is It Important?

The ultimate goal of web accessibility is to build websites that are accessible to everyone. It means a website has to be designed in such a way that people with disabilities can also access it seamlessly.

It helps break barriers of communication for people with different abilities on the web that they usually deal with in the physical world. However, many websites, tools, and technologies fail to fulfill this requirement due to their poor designs and structure creating discrimination among visitors.

So if you want to create a high-quality website, you need to focus on web accessibility. In this article, you will learn about the definition of web accessibility, why it is important, and more.

What is web accessibility?

The concept of web accessibility defines the practice of making websites accessible to everyone including differently-abled people.

To meet the web accessibility requirements,? you need to create a website based on certain design and development principles to make sure that people with disabilities can also communicate with it easily and get the same experience as everyone else.

Find out the web accessibility principles in our next segment.

What are the four principles of web accessibility?

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines declared that website creators need to follow four major principles to make their website accessible to everyone, they are mentioned below:

• Perceivable: This signifies the understandability of your website. In simple words, it shows how well your visitors understand the content of your website.

Here it is to keep in mind that it is not always related to seeing the content. People with blindness or any other vision issues often rely on screen reader tools that transform the content into simplified speeches. That is why you need to create website content that is easily perceivable.

• Operable: An operable website allows visitors to use it without any obstacles. For example, they can easily navigate to the exact pages they want to, and all the links are added properly to it.??

To make your website operable, you can keep the design simple and try not to overwhelm it with lots of functionalities.

• Understandable: You need to make sure that your website’s textual and graphical content both are easily understood by people with disabilities. When you use complex language or content on your site, you unknowingly restrict it to a specific section of audience which ultimately limits your reach.?

Try to avoid jumbled words, keep the language and overall structure of your website clean and simple.

• Robust: lastly, you need to create your website content in such a way that can be easily decoded by visitors who use assistive technologies like screen readers.?

To fulfill this requirement, use HTML that enables assistive technologies to analyze without visual assistance.

You can only achieve web accessibility if your website fulfills all of the above-mentioned principles.

Why Web accessibility is important

Web accessibility is no longer an option for businesses, it has become a necessity. This is because making your accessible to everyone indicates that you care for your website visitors and their experience on your site. So designing a website to increase its accessibility is beneficial in many ways. Here are? its key benefits:

1. Increase traffic with accessible web design: According to WHO , one in every six people has a disability. If your website is not accessible to these people then you are sure to limit your brand’s exposure. That is why having an easily accessible website means a sharp increase in website traffic.

2. Improve user experience: When you make your website accessible it makes it easy for all your visitors including people with disabilities to understand your messages, services, goals and offerings. This highly improves user experience and satisfaction.

3. Boost engagement: Building an accessible website ensures that your content is easily understood by all types of people which indicates that they are most likely to spend more time on your site to interact with it.

4. Better SEO: Major search engines like Google always prefers accessible web designs which increases your chances of securing a higher place on search engine results. Besides this, increased traffic and superior user experience also help improve Search Engine Optimization.

5. Increase brand credibility: As mentioned above, creating an accessible website shows how much you prioritize user experience which ultimately improves brand reputation and increase credibility.

Things to include to achieve accessibility in web designs

In order to achieve accessibility in web designs you need to consider the following things:

• Responsiveness: Using responsive designs means your website visuals will not be affected due to a change in device screen size.?

• Using symbols: it is good to add symbols to display important parts of your website content. This helps people with colorblindness who are not able to differentiate colors.?

• Easily recognizable interactive elements: Make your action buttons prominent, easily identifiable and visible on your website. Label them clearly, try different styles etc to help users identify them easily.?

• Typography: Keep an eye on the typography you choose for your website. Make sure you select easily readable, prominent fonts and utilize your space properly to distinguish between two different types of text.?
• Maintaining contrast:To make your website content easily readable, use contrasting colors for your text content and background. For example you can go for a light color background and dark color text or vice versa.

Wrapping up

Building accessible websites is crucial for every business due to the growing competition in every industry. Business owners can not afford to lose an opportunity to gain exposure. Web accessibility helps increase traffic, brand credibility, improves SEO, user experience, boost engagement and more.?

We hope that this article will be helpful for you in achieving web accessibility for your business website.