Accessibility is a fundamental part of any website and it should be baked into every decision you’re making about your brand assets. Here’s how to do it.
Transcript
Accessibility is a fundamental part of any website and it should be baked into every single part of the process leading up to and including the website. You should be taking accessibility into consideration when you’re picking brand assets like fonts or colors, it should be considered when you’re creating content on social media. You should be adding alt tags to your images that you post, make sure that links are descriptive, and that anybody who comes across anything you make can use it.
So how do you do that on a website? Well, there’s a lot of things that you should take into consideration, and then there’s things that you could, if you want to, take it a step further. But the important part about accessibility is that you start. The biggest hurdle, I think, is that it seems like such a daunting large thing that I’m never going to become compliant, so I’ll just do it and hope for the best.
And unfortunately, that not only leaves you open to lawsuits and other kinds of legal things, but it’s not right for the people that are coming to your website. So you should be making every effort possible to make your website as easy to use as you can.
There’s a big long list of things that you can do, but some of the things that you could go on and do right now are doing an audit, always sounds super boring, but that’s how you find out what’s wrong if you currently have a site. And you take a look at things like headings, heading orders, font choices that you’re using, color contrast, do you have an image background that has text on top of it? It’s kind of hard to read. There’s just all these things that you can do just at a glance, just to start the process.
Ultimately, it is also involved in the code of your website. But any platform that doesn’t create accessible websites shouldn’t even enter into the consideration of creating a website for yourself. Any device, any usage, so if somebody’s not using a mouse to come to your website, if somebody is using a screen reader, if somebody comes on and has limited vision, there’s so many possibilities of ways that people can come to your site.
But the important thing is that you at least are aware of it and that you start thinking about it in the larger scope of your business as a whole.