Can blind people use your website?

Oct 20

Written By G3 Misa

Your website may have tons of nice features like image carousels, high resolution videos, animations, social media connectors, etc. but may be missing one important feature - Accessibility. Blind or visually impaired people use screen readers to browse websites and if your website isn't screen reader friendly, then your website is useless to them.

WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?

There has been a sudden rise of lawsuits stemming from users with disability not being able to use certain websites. These have been happening in a wide variety of industries, including retail, hospitality, education and media services. Now even career sites are being sued by job applicants for not being accessible. In 2018, the number of federal lawsuits filed related to web inaccessibility was almost three times higher than 2017. It rose from 814 to 2,258! This was an analysis by international legal firm Seyfarth Shaw.

CHECK IF YOUR WEBSITE IS ACCESSIBLE.

Better to be safe than sorry! Reach out to your webmaster and ask him if your website is accessible. To find out on your own, download the Google Chrome browser (if you don't already have one) and install the Chrome Extension, Chromevox. Once activated on your browser, go to your website, imagine you're blind and start browsing through your web pages. You should hear a voice reading your content, telling you what buttons are available to click and where they will take you. It will tell you the description of images displayed, lists and bullet points, and a lot more. In other words, it makes things easier for the visually impaired to navigate your site and hear content!

HOW TO MAKE YOUR WEBSITE ACCESSIBLE

The level of effort to add accessibility on your website depends mostly on how your HTML was written. One of the reasons why HTML 5 was developed was to provide semantic tags to better describe your markup. Here are 5 basic tips to start make your website accessible:

1. Make sure you have a descriptive Page Title. This is the very first thing the screen reader mentions.

2. Instead of having tons of div elements on your HTML document, you can take advantage of HTML 5 semantic tags such as section, article, nav, header, footer, button, etc. This will allow the screen reader to better describe content to your user.

3. Make sure your hyperlinks have descriptive title attributes such as the example below:

<a href="booking.html" title="Go to the Booking Page">Booking</a>

4. You can take advantage of access keys which provide keyboard shortcuts to your users. For example:

<a href="booking.html" title="Go to the Booking Page" accesskey="b">Booking</a>

This will allow your user to go to the Booking page by pressing the letter b on his keyboard.

5. Make sure your images have the alt attribute. For example:

<img src="images/verynicesunset.jpg" alt="a very nice sunset" />

This will tell your user what the image is all about.

These 5 basic tips should get your website started for accessibility. Companies should make it a point that their website's content, navigation links and buttons are all read out to the blind or visually impaired so that they do not miss anything important.

If you need help with your website's accessibility, Claymind can point you to the right direction.