Designing a website must not begin and end with showcasing your works, products, or services. More importantly, your website must take into account accessibility and inclusion for all users, especially persons with disabilities. According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, Americans with disabilities are three times as likely as those without a disability to say that they never go online (15% vs. 5%), mainly due to the digital divide and the lack of accessible user experiences on websites, applications, and programs.
Considering that 1.3 billion people worldwide have a disability and represent roughly 16% of the population, web design must incorporate accessibility features to deliver inclusive experiences and ensure positive interactions with website visitors and potential customers. Below, we take a closer look at the benefits of accessible websites and how individuals and businesses can leverage these through user-friendly features.
Why websites should be accessible
In light of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), websites operating in the United States must be accessible to everyone regardless of their ability to ensure inclusion and nondiscrimination. Upholding this well-known civil rights law can reduce potential legal and financial risks for your company or organization, considering non-compliance with the ADA guidelines has resulted in over 8,200 digital accessibility lawsuits that cost anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000 in 2023 alone.
However, beyond legal compliance, prioritizing accessibility and inclusion can help you reach more customers since persons with disabilities represent a significant portion of the global population. Data also shows that customers with disabilities prefer to shop online, with half of the demographic making weekly online purchases while 6% do so daily.
Aligning your website design with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which emphasize perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust information, also supports search engine optimization (SEO). To illustrate, search engines like Google rank websites with clear headings and intuitive navigation—the same factors crucial for disabled users—higher and ultimately boost your site’s discoverability.
Overall, designing a website with accessibility in mind ensures a positive experience for all users, regardless of their background and ability, as digital accessibility practices are closely linked to basic UI/UX design principles like a clear visual hierarchy and consistent navigation. The following section outlines specific features to incorporate into web design for a more digitally accessible experience.
Accessible design features to incorporate into your website
Perceivable text and colors
Users with poor eyesight due to aging, blindness, color blindness, cataracts, and other vision impairments can benefit from content displayed in a readable typeface and font size. Thus, a previous post guides you through the accessibility features introduced in a Joomla 4 plug-in, which enables you to adjust the text size and spacing, underline clickable buttons and links, and enlarge the cursor size.
Color balance and contrast can also influence website perceivability and accessibility, with the WCAG recommending a a 4.5:1 color ratio between the background and the text. Thus, the previously mentioned Joomla 4 features include the option to invert colors for higher contrast sensitivity.
Screen reader compatibility
In addition to perceivable text and high color contrast, low-vision web and mobile users can be aided by screen readers, such as Android’s TalkBack feature. This feature, first introduced in 2009, provides audio prompts for proper navigation using the device display and allows users to customize their controls and menus to tailor the experience to their specific needs and abilities.
To make your website compatible with screen readers, ensure clearly defined page titles, headings, and links and provide meaningful and alternative text (alt text) for images and other visual media. Best practices for adding alt text include a concise description of up to 100 characters and adding context and key elements of why you chose the image.
Audio support
Like screen readers, hearing solutions as assistive technology for deaf individuals have continuously advanced in recent years. One such solution is Nuance’s hearing glasses, which integrate over-the-counter hearing aids into smart glasses. This all-in-one vision and hearing solution reduces listening effort and amplifies sound not only for real-time conversations but also for music and audio content on websites.
No matter how advanced hearing solutions have become, your website must still support audio elements through features like closed-text transcripts and captions for videos. While assistive devices like hearing aids and hearing glasses are equipped with customizable controls, it still helps to add volume controls for web media players for a more accessible and personalized experience.
Keyboard-friendly navigation
Vision and hearing impairments are not the only disabilities to consider when designing an accessible website. People with motor issues may have difficulty using a mouse to navigate a website, thus making it crucial for your website to be entirely navigable using only a keyboard. You may add keyboard shortcuts and commands for interactive elements, such as pressing the arrow keys to move up and down and using the enter key to submit user information.
As you incorporate these accessibility features into web design and development, remember to conduct accessibility testing to ensure that your website caters to a wide user base and achieves full digital inclusion for users with vision impairment, hearing loss, motor issues, and other disabilities. A viable tool to use is TestParty, which deploys artificial intelligence to automate accessibility testing to reduce the bottlenecks and expenses associated with manual testing, training, remediation, and monitoring.
If you found this article helpful, continue reading the blog posts here at L.THEME for more insightful resources on web design and development using Joomla and WordPress.
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