As you design your website, it’s also essential to optimize it for your potential visitor to make it more user-compatible, more so for such viewers who possess special challenges. You need to understand and cater to the requirements of your visitors and find out the shortcomings of your site. Following this, you can utilize dedicated plugins and themes to make the life of your audience simpler and increase traffic at the same time.
Let’s take a look at the ways to include design in your WordPress site that makes it more accessible to your visitors with ‘typical’ abilities as well as for such potential audiences who suffer from a physical or mental disability who also would benefit from your site. Like for instance, a site that uses heavy dark images can be difficult for people to see who are visually disabled and draw sense out of it. In a similar way, people facing problems with the application of a mouse and keyboard can experience trouble with normal navigation schemes.
Make sure that your site remains accessible for everyone who lands up on your pages so that they can communicate in a better way, whatever challenges they might face. Improve your WordPress accessibility promptly now with the following tips:
Label Correctly Your Images Using Alt Text
It is important to utilize alt text correctly to illustrate images upon a web page. This helps to create greater accessibility. To place it differently, every significant image on a website must contain an alt tag. The details in the alt tag permit people who use screen readers (to decipher web pages loudly to users having visual difficulties), text-specific browsers and delayed connections that fail to load images to know about the details presented by images.
By labeling your images, and utilizing descriptive text you make it easier for people to understand the relevance of the image and what it wants to convey and the perfect words to convey the meaning.
A typical example is using a magnifying glass as an image to be used as a button to begin a search. The image conveys a meaning, hence it has to be described. Explaining it simply as ‘a magnifying glass’ can not assist the user. It becomes necessary for them to understand is that tapping on this button initiates a search, therefore, alt text of ‘click here to search’ or simply ‘search’ may appear suitable.
Images that specifically performs a purpose needs to be labeled. For instance:
- Images that can be utilized as buttons
- Images that can be utilized for a different control
- Images that are associated directly with the content
Such a technique is employed to all web pages, and not exclusively to WordPress sites. Moreover, WordPress simplifies the process by permitting the content author to interchange between HTML and Visual views and offering an alt text field in case an image is added using the Add Media feature.
Be Picky With Your Plugins
Plugins are the major element that helps WordPress to power millions of posts and online sites.
You can enhance WordPress accessibility by applying various plugins that are simple to install. These plugins can support users having various disabilities to access the webpage. Some of the plugins that are particularly useful are:
WP Accessibility
Troubleshoots general accessibility problems of your website.This plugin increments various accessibility functionalities such as:
- The capacity to allow skipping of links
- Inserts an outline to the focus state of the keyboard
- Increases a toolbar that let you enable and disable between sharp contrast, large formatting and desaturated or toned down appearances of your theme
- Include lengthy image description
- Excludes tab index from components that utilize the keyboard-interactive elements and focus
- Excludes unnecessary title characteristics from page plus category lists
- If you want to include everything that makes your site highly accessible, this plugin has it all that can upgrade the accessibility without altering the theme.
Skip To – An easy process to increase the effectiveness of your website’s “Skip To Content” features
Access Keys
The WordPress Plugin Access Keys lets you add access keys to categories and pages so that the accessibility of your site. This plugin functions with any category or page list. Access keys permit site administrators to define access keys or shortcuts for the keyboard to navigate.
Individuals with blindness are not able to navigate sites using a graphical user interface but depend specifically on their keyboard. Access keys function as time-conserving shortcuts that permit them to speedily navigate.
The WordPress variant of this plugin allows an administrator to define access keys for “search page”, “home page”, “skip to main content” or “jump to the top of the page”.An access key that is customized can transfer the user towards any URL which the administrator selects to link up that key with. Therefore, if you prefer an access key with regard to a particular WordPress page, or Twitter link, you can define one.
Besides the access plugin includes a widget that helps to inform the user about the access keys applied on the website. It can be positioned on the template of any site offering an open sidebar location, and also customized with a title specified by an administrator.
Be Different From Other WordPress Site
Set your own benchmarks and appear distinct from various WordPress sites by making it more interactive and experimenting with customization on the way you prefer to keep the display of your blog listing, type of the buttons, primary background image for the complete website and also improvisations on the default layout of the site.
Your choice of plugins that extend the abilities of your website is also important as it improves its functionality by supplementing it with the much-needed features. Plugins help you to achieve some amazing features without requiring any coding.
Your links should be accessible to keyboards as certain assistive technologies depend on keyboard input or a virtual keyboard in place of a mouse. It is essential to notify users whether a link opens separately or in a new window or about links to video files and PDF. Your site should employ more than one way to notify users so as to adjust with various disability levels and browser support.
Other aspects like designing your forms to enhance accessibility and labeling them appropriately, distinguishing the use of color to organize the content, providing proper descriptive links to create a better understanding of the links to the user of a screen-reader and perfectly organizing the content structure through proper headings all contribute to making your site unique from other sites.
Set An Accent Color That Represents Your Brand
Another process that contributes to making your WordPress site highly accessible is by employing sharp contrasting colors on the site. This aids individuals suffering from visual disorders like for instance color blindness and distinguishing easily identifiable buttons, links and menu lists on your portal from different regions of your website.
Give your brand a highlighted color tone that differentiates your brand from others. Try not to apply text which is light grey on a light background since this hampers readability. Rather make use of black text on a black backdrop combined with different colors for the command button.
Intense contrast color within the background and the color of the text makes the content extra accessible. Your selection of the text color is essential as it helps the site visitors who are color blind. To attain the correct color of the text is not so easy as many aspects are involved such as brand color, feeling related and psychological effects and accessibility.
How to Setup Push Notifications to Your WordPress Site
Common barriers of accessible website design?
“The power of the Web is in its universality.
Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect”
These are the words of Tim Berners -Lee, Director of the W3C and founder of the World Wide Web.
Accessible web design works towards building websites that cater to all people whatever the software, language, location, hardware or category of physical, cognitive or sensory ability may be. By designing an accessible website, you make it easy for everyone to use your site without any requirement for assistance.
However, some of the general barriers of website design that makes your website less accessible to web content are:
- Lack of operable interface elements and navigation. An illustration of it is making all features and functions of the site possible from a keyboard.
- Graphic containing embedded text also acts as a barrier as individuals having vision disabilities using screen readers will be unable to read the graphic. You should make available a transcript of the graphic having embedded text, so as to let the screen reader follow it in a methodical sequence.
- Website navigation with the mouse as it makes the website inaccessible to people utilizing screen readers
- Applications depending on colors to differentiate different parts as colorblind people are not able to use such an application. Do not convey functions through color or color-coding
- Videos without captions as it makes your website inaccessible to individuals having a hearing impairment
- Application process having timed assessments restricts people suffering from cognitive or learning disorders from finishing such an application. Remove timeout restrictions if you can or extend them for a longer duration
Conclusion On WordPress accessibility
Several organizations are becoming more aware of the multifarious advantages of implementing website accessibility which helps to consolidate brand presence, lowers legal consequences, enhances customer experience and team productivity. Accessibility, besides being helpful to the one billion disabled population around the globe is also equally effective for business by boosting your SEO, apps quality and facilitates the positive image of your company and digital efforts for transformation.
