Is Accessibility Important when Building your Business Website?

As a business owner, your responsibility is to ensure that your company website caters to your entire customer base.

Your site sould be easily accessed by anyone and everyone, regardless of any disabilities or limitations that they may face.

There are a wide range of disabilities that may impact how a potential customer uses the internet, such as

– Visual
– Auditory
– Physical
– Neurological
– Cognitive
– Vocal

However, these limitations should not stand in the way of a user’s ability to access and interact with your business website.

In the article below, Anthony Tedd will list some of the ways that you can work to make your pages more accessible when building your company website, ensuring your entire target audience is well catered for.

Use Alt Tags on your Images

Images are a great way to enhance the content that your website displays to users, helping to improve visual aspects of your web design and showcase exactly what it is that your company has to offer.

However, images can also act as one of the biggest accessibility barriers for those with visual disabilities.

Imagery is used to enhance the content displayed on your website landing pages, enhancing the user experience and sometimes meaning that the author can be less descript within the content itself.

How do you ensure that those with visual impairments will be able to get the same level of information from your website without the assistance of these photos?

For those with a visual disability to be able to gain the full experience of your website’s pages, descriptive alt tags should be added to all relevant images.

This is crucial for users who rely on assistive technology, such as screen readers, that read aloud the information being displayed on a website.

While these aids are great for conveying written information, they are unable to translate images.

An alt tag helps to describe exactly what an image contains, and is what will be read aloud by screen readers to explain to those with visual impairments what your website shows .

Alt tags help to improve the user experience, so are a vital feature to remember when building your company website.

Closed Captions for your Videos

Similar to images, video is a great way to provide your site visitors with important information in a way that is typically more digestible, improving the overall user experience and meaning your potential customers don’t have to face walls of text to get the knowledge that they need.

However, this content source can isolate your deaf or hard of hearing customers, resulting in them being unable to access crucial information on your product and service pages.

Adding closed captions to your videos that work to display any spoken information in a plain text format is a great way to combat this potential issue, meaning video content is made available to users with auditory impairments in a way that is accessible to them.

There are a wide number of ways that you can account for accessibility when building your company website, ensuring that the information that you display on your landing pages can be accessed by your entire customer base, regardless of any disabilities or impairments.

For more information on building the perfect website for your business, sign up for Anthony Tedd’s free website building course today.