Think your site could do better when it comes to accessibility? Check out our Product Support Team’s top five accessibility tips – five simple tasks to help you boost site accessibility.
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Factor in assistive technology
Blind or partially sighted users may use assistive technologies such as screen readers when accessing your website. Screen readers use headings to help disabled users jump to content sections and navigate a page. Ensuring all your headings are unique, and that page elements such as tables have clearly defined header and column rows makes this process easier.
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Don’t forget “alt” attributes
This is the number one accessibility mistake made on websites – and it’s the most common cause of legal action in this area. Adding meaningful “alt” attributes to all images on your site – including form buttons – ensures that users get a description of the image content even if they can’t see it.
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Use the right text markup tags
A number of commonly used HTML tags are detrimental to your accessibility rating. Try to avoid underlining text when you want to highlight it and replace bold tags and italic tags with strong tags and emphasis tags respectively. This makes text easier for assistive technologies to read by giving text the correct structural emphasis.
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Use meaningful page titles
Screen readers will read out the titles of page elements such as files and links. Giving these elements descriptive titles makes them easier for users of screen readers to identify correctly – this is especially important in cases where the content of a link is an image.
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Avoid meaningless links
Make sure your hyperlink text describes the link destination. Meaningful link text helps users scan the page more easily, whereas using links like “click here” is an accessibility issue as it assumes that the user is using a mouse to navigate the site.
ActiveStandards contains an extensive range of accessibility standards and reports. Learn more by visiting our quality and compliance page.
