How To Conduct an Accessibility Check On Your Website
As product designers love to remind us, creating websites with accessibility in mind improves the experience for all users. Not only is accessibility a legal requirement for many websites – but website accessibility ensures that all users, including those with disabilities, can access and navigate your site effectively. Plus, improving accessibility comes with SEO perks.
Many website factors contribute to accessibility. A simple method for conducting an accessibility check involves checking in on ten major site components:
- Your main navigation needs to be consistent and intuitive.
- Breadcrumb navigation gives users a streamlined logic to find what they want on your site.
- Keyboard navigation allows users to peruse your site without a mouse – which is key if they rely on devices such as speech inputs.
- A site’s crawlability facilitates text-to-speech audio synthesizers. Being crawlable is also critical to search engines.
- Web page titles assist users with a quick, straightforward understanding of a page’s content.
- Similarly, section headers make a page scannable and quickly understandable for users of all abilities.
- Alt text is an essential tool for sites that rely on visuals.
- In the same vein, video-heavy sites should include transcripts and captions.
- A media description should accompany any multimedia content on your site.
- Lastly, descriptive links with legible words are enormously helpful for both accessibility and SEO.
There are many accessibility evaluation tools that marketers and web admins can employ, such as WAVE, axe, or the built-in accessibility features of popular web browsers to scan your web pages. Be sure to conduct accessibility checks on various browsers and devices to ensure a consistent experience for all users.
If you are interested in honing your marketing focus on critical elements to ensure a more inclusive and user-friendly website for all visitors, ASTRALCOM can help. Our SEO expertise can help you align your search engine goals with real-world use cases of users from every possible corner of your market – including those with access needs.
