Inclusivity should be at the forefront of your mind when designing any website, which means maintaining accessibility for all users wishing to use your site. Web accessibility should not be optional in today’s hyper-connected world, and disabilities, impairments, and other limitations should not bar access to your website.

Thinking about different types of users has become essential for web designers, developers, writers, and others responsible for a site’s design, considering that one in five people has a disability. Anyone not thinking about accessibility risks alienating a large proportion of their user base.

Following web accessibility best practices means familiarizing yourself with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), last updated in October 2023, and putting them into practice on your site.

Businesses can get ahead of the curve if they implement web accessibility guidelines without being forced to and avoid costly legal battles. Dismantling privilege and widening access to information, products, or services is the responsibility of all web design professionals who want to create inclusive sites that provide great experiences for everyone.

What is Web Accessibility?

Web accessibility accounts for many variations in the abilities of users accessing websites. Not everyone has the same needs and following web accessibility principles means designing your site to have a reasonably similar and successful experience for users with all types of abilities.

There are all sorts of hurdles for people with disabilities that those without disabilities wouldn’t even consider, but accessing websites should not be one of them. Designing inclusive websites with disabilities in mind is at the core of good web design because it means your business cares about its users since you avoid excluding certain groups. Disabilities or limited abilities can even be temporary, affecting anyone.

Significance of Making Websites Accessible to People with Disabilities

Aside from being just a good thing to do to look after every user, business benefits come from implementing web accessibility. You significantly widen your user base if you make your website accessible to everyone, and you also comply with legal requirements if you are a public or private sector organization.

Even someone without an obvious disability may struggle to use your website if you don’t follow web accessibility guidelines. It means prioritizing your site’s usability over other aesthetic or financial concerns that may create obstacles for users.

In 2023, 96.3% of the top 1,000,000 websites on the internet had WCAG failures, most notably with low-contrast text that many people find difficult to read. This means that most websites present problems for users with access difficulties and that bad web design is sadly still the norm.

Web Accessibility Standards

The body responsible for web accessibility standards is the W3C, which has published the WCAG mentioned earlier. The WCAG is a publicly available resource that anyone responsible for building a website can use to ensure they are adhering to web accessibility standards.

Use the WCAG to understand the individual components a website needs to have to conform to web accessibility guidelines and understand how you comply with the different levels of accessibility.

How to Develop an Accessible Website

If you’ve taken the time to evaluate your site against the WCAG standards, you might have realized that it’s not quite up to scratch. The WCAG has provided some of the following guidelines you can apply to improve the accessibility of your site. Although there are multiple guidelines you can apply, we’ll provide only a summary of the full guidelines.

Perceivable Web Accessibility Guidelines

Accessible websites will provide multiple ways to perceive content that doesn’t just rely on working vision or another single sense. For example, including alt text is essential for images, full transcripts for audio files, and live captions for videos. You must also structure your HTML so that you wouldn’t sacrifice the meaning of the page content if you lose the page styling (for example, slow internet connections).

Operable Web Accessibility Guidelines

Since operable means that users must be able to easily use your website, for example, they must be able to operate your site with a keyboard rather than a touchpad or a mouse. It must not be difficult to interact with certain elements of your page, such as carousels that move or menus that disappear. Your website’s navigation should be completely clear, with headings and obvious links that help them move around.

Understandable Web Accessibility Guidelines

In the quest to make your website understandable, you should take every sensible step to ensure that users can comprehend the meaning of your site, so that means writing in a highly readable way for most users. It shouldn’t be necessary to know technical jargon or specialist terminology to understand the content of your website. It also means looking after your users when things go wrong, such as writing helpful error messages that enable users to diagnose the problem.

Robust Web Accessibility Guidelines

Ensuring your website is robust refers to how the HTML is written so that assistive technologies can parse it. This means that developers know about how to write the code so that it can be transferred into different formats.

Click here to read more on Web accessibility and real-world examples.