It is easy to build a website, but it is important to ensure that your website is also accessible to everyone. In fact, ensuring accessibility and compliance with ADA regulations is not easy. There are various aspects of web page elements and navigations to be taken care of in order to ensure accessibility compliance. Ranging from the simple design elements to the most important HTML coding, the designers and developers need to have expertise in accessibility compliance requirements to ensure the same.
Different providers offer many tools to audit the accessibility features of the website and also to ensure that it meets the guidelines and standards. This article will discuss some of the most important aspects of ensuring website accessibility while coding your business website. Website development experts give this guidance with in-depth knowledge of the ADA rules.
Rules for ensuring website accessibility by AccessiBe
AccessiBe is a renowned service provider in the accessibility compliance industry that has helped thousands of websites to meet ADA compliance needs. In this article, the experts from the company are putting forth some of the fundamental rules to ensure accessibility compliance for websites.
- Using descriptive and concise text
One primary need to ensure accessibility is the use of concise and descriptive text for web page content. This includes the alt text for images and graphics too. You may not use colors alone to share any information or instructions. You may take measures to support the color-blind users with some shapes, patterns, or audio cues to take action.
- Make an adaptive site
You need to ensure that your website is made adaptable. This means you have to ensure that the users can control the navigation easily, understand the content instantly, and use the stylesheet at their convenience.
- Build inviting website
The website developers need to make sure that along with the visual interest, you should also take measures in order not to overwhelm the users. There should not be too many distracting flashy animations or unwanted images on the page. The visual cues for navigation also should not be color-defined but more straight and easily understandable to people with cognitive disabilities.
- Avoid any text-only links
On some websites, you may have seen links like “click here” or “click for more,” etc., as the link text. Instead of these, you have to put meaningful link text, which is descriptive, to make the screen readers and people with cognitive debilities understand where the links lead.
- Avoid table layouts
If there is a need to use tables, you may try to put a proper caption and also descriptive texts at the bottom of the table. You may not simply rely on the screen readers to recognize captions.
Some other recommendations by AccessiBe to ensure ADA compliance are avoiding the use of graphics, browser or OS-specific elements, and restricted user settings. You may also enable all users to have an accessible experience browsing the website on various browsers and devices.