What if your website isn’t optimized for a large number of people? Even though you have hired one of the best freelancers in your area but haven’t thought about this accessibility option.
What I am trying to say is that we all are visually gifted, but their are people that want to visit your site, but can’t because they might be visually impaired. For this little negligence you might be losing a good amount of people.
Visually impaired people generally navigate through your pages with non-visible elements, for example – image descriptions. So, make your site fully accessible to everyone including those who can’t see it.
Following are few steps that would help you achieve success in making your website universally accessible.
Web Accessibility Test
From a simple test you can now see if your website is universally accessible or not. Follow the steps below to check whether you require to change something essential on your site’s backend.
Step 1
Go to the WAVE website at wave.webaim.org Type the web address of the page you want to analyse into the box and press Enter or the arrow button. The page loads into the browser on the right, next to a summary of problem, alerts and features in a panel on the left.
Step 2
Click the flag icon to see the details of your site’s problems. Click an icon to scroll the screen to the section it’s referring to and it will highlight where the problem lies on your page. Click a blue ‘i’ icon to find out more about the different types of problems.
Step 3
Press the tab to view your site’s HTML code. Highlight a problem area by clicking its icon. Red Errors should be fixed; yellow Alerts are warnings and green Features are what you’ve got right with no CSS; and Contrasts to highlight color problems.
This can be done in any web browser and in a matter of 5 mins you can tell which of the issues are making your site inaccessible to visually impaired people.
Text and Background with Sufficient Contrast
Another way to improve your website visually for the well-sighted person as well can be a good balance between the text and background in respect of the contrast. Many website owners never think of eyestrains that their visitors may feel. So, especially for visually impaired people there is a limit of contrast ratio – 4.5:1, which is directed by WCAG.
And there are tools that can help you on detecting your website’s contrast ratio.
http://leaverou.github.io/contrast-ratio/
http://juicystudio.com/services/luminositycontrastratio.php#specify
http://www.colorsontheweb.com/colorcontrast.asp
The Larger text has lower ratios, like for a logo the contrast ratio falls to 3:1. So before moving to a new theme for your website keep in mind that the default colors, palettes used should have a well maintained and customizable colors.
So, now you know how to check your website and rectify problems with accessibility. Let us know, if you have any other tool for visually impaired people and how can we help them surf web better.