Making your website accessible to all is not only the right thing to do, it’s also a smart business decision.
According to the World Health Organization, one in five people have some form of disability, and that number is only going to increase as the population ages.
By making your website accessible, you open your business up to a whole new market of potential customers!
In this blog post, we will discuss how you can make your website more accessible for those with disabilities.
For those with Visual Impairment
Around 285,000 people in Australia are blind or have low vision. That’s almost one percent of the population! There are many different types of visual impairment, so it’s important to make your website as accessible as possible for everyone.
Here are some tips for making your website more accessible:
– Use high contrast colours that are easy to see
– Make sure all text is large and clear
– Use images that have descriptive alt tags
– Avoid using flashing or strobing effects
– Enable keyboard navigation so people can navigate through your site without a mouse
To achieve this we use Accessibe. Check out the icon in the bottom right-hand corner of this site. All it takes is one line of code and users can adjust the website according to their preferences and needs.
For those with Hearing Difficulty
How about for those with hearing difficulty.
Around 15% of the population in Australia experience some form of hearing difficulty or deafness. This can make it difficult for them to experience online content like videos.
For this type of content you make have already seen or actively use this yourself when you’re in environments that are too noisy to hear or where you can’t make noise!
Subtitles and Closed Captions
Simply provide subtitles or closed captions in your videos. These days many video providers like youtube, and Instagram, provide auto-captioning powered by AI free of charge. They’re amazing!
If you want to go a step beyond and really help give people the full experience and impact of your content, it’s important to know the difference between subtitles and closed captions.
Subtitles show the dialogue whereas closed captions supplement the dialogue by describing things like, who is speaking, background noises, and other important contextual audio clues. Adding close captions creates a much greater impact.
For those that suffer from seizures
There are an estimated 65,000 people in Australia who suffer from epilepsy. This means that one in every 130 Australians has the condition. Epilepsy is a neurological disorder characterised by recurrent seizures. Many of these seizures are caused by light and those that suffer from it have what is called photosensitive epilsepy.
Remove, pause or hide any content that flickers flashes or blinks. Oh, and you’ll need to remove certain visual patterns like stripes that induce seizures or cause other physical reactions as well.
It can be a lot of effort allowing for these accessibility, and designing and coding in alternatives to your videos, GIFs, animated PNG’s and scripts. That’s why we simply let Accessibe do it for us on the fly.
It may sound like we’re plugging it a lot. But here’s the thing. Our sole mission is to increase your profits (not just your revenue) and help you grow your business. So we know what’s worth spending time and money on and what isn’t. Reversing all your attention-grabbing high converting assets isn’t one of them. We let Accessibe do it for us.
It really is the right thing to do
If you suffer from any disability that affects your enjoyment and consumption of web content you’ll know how great it is when a brand provides accessible content and a safe user experience for you. And if you don’t you can spend this time being grateful and advocating safe, accessible user experiences and content for those you love and (potentially) yourself in the future.
All our Conversion Audit clients get a 10% discount on their subscription and save thousands of dollars in additional dev time maintaining a compliant website.
Talk to us to learn more.
