What’s the number one thing you want your website to achieve? High volumes of quality traffic, yes – not to mention plenty of conversions. But ultimately – and for those goals to be realised – you’ve got to ensure that your site is ticking all the boxes when it comes to user experience.
There are the obvious considerations, like how easy it is to navigate and how fast it is to load, but the UX goes far beyond that.
Accessibility is a key part of the user experience. With more than 70% of website visitors with a disability stating that they will leave a website if they feel it is not accessible, it should be considered a fundamental of web design, but it continues to be downplayed by so many designers.
Find out more about building accessibility into your site design below.
1. First, What is Accessible Website Design?
It’s a broad topic, covering many different elements that can be utilised in order to provide a strong user experience to those with disabilities. Disabilities that impact web use can be physical, but they can also be auditory, visual, neurological or cognitive.
Examples include the use of image alternative text, which ensures that the meaning of visual or audio content (say, product photographs or ‘How To’ videos) can still be conveyed to those who cannot easily see or hear the content, or keyboard navigation, which makes it much easier for those with mobility issues to use your site.
What’s more, many elements that benefit all users – not just those with disabilities – can boost your site’s accessibility. Proper use of HTML tags, particularly for headings, forms, and anchors, can drastically improve your site’s performance when used alongside a screen reader.
2. What Laws Impact Your Site’s Design?
Accessibility isn’t just an important part of the user experience when it comes to your brand’s reputation; it’s also an important legal consideration.
As you can imagine, these laws vary depending on where you are in the world. In the UK, commercial websites need to meet the stipulations of the Equality Act 2010, which requests ‘reasonable adjustments’ to be made in order to make a website more accessible.
The language is, admittedly, vague, and there are no prominent cases of the Equality Act being used in any court cases over site design. Still, there are so many reasons to embrace the act beyond what’s written into UK law.
3. It’s not just about what you include…
…it’s also about what you decide to omit from the design. HTML tags, alt text, keyboard navigation, scalable text – it’s all great and beneficial, but it’s not going to mean much if your site is riddled with elements and features that make life harder for some of your users.
Contrast issues, such as colours too close in shade or tone, or text that is too light or dark, can make a website very inaccessible to many visitors. Elements that make the page too confusing – such as flashing logos/buttons or links that are too small for many users to see – can also negatively impact UX, so think very carefully about this side of the design, too.
4. Font matters
By now, most of us – and certainly the web design world in general – have moved beyond the era of favouring zany fonts over legible text, but this one is still always worth saying. Whacky typography can be incredibly hard for those with poor eyesight or learning difficulties to read.
Sans serif fonts are generally considered to be the most ‘readable’ fonts, provided there is enough contrast between the text and the background. Similarly, any hyperlinked text should stand out clearly from the background, and the rest of the text surrounding it.
5. Adaptable design
This one benefits everyone, and ensures that, however your users choose to access your site – whether through their PC, a tablet, or the much smaller screens on their phone – their experience isn’t interrupted by disorganised layouts, broken text, images in the wrong places, and drop-down menus that have collapsed on top of themselves.
Adaptable or responsive design is all but essential to good web design these days.
There are so many reasons to spare an extra thought for your website’s accessibility. While in the UK, there are very few concrete laws (and even fewer examples of businesses running afoul of them) when it comes to website accessibility, ensuring that every one of your customers is able to gain the same benefit from your site, and enjoy the same smooth, frictionless experience, should be of paramount importance.
