Website accessibility is a key factor in website design. Advanced tools like AccessiBe can help when designing your website and improving its accessibility for your users. A review of AccessiBe reviews shows how it improves the design process and helps remove the guesswork when making an accessible website. There are several common errors you can make when designing a website that reduces its accessibility. Many of these errors are quite common and easy to make, which is one of the reasons tools specifically designed to help with these issues are so important.
Here are seven of the most common website design mistakes that reduce the accessibility of your website.
Making Your Website Accessible
- Don’t Over Explain: a common issue with website design is knowing when to stop adding content. As choices increase and the amount of information you have available increases making a sound choice becomes more difficult. To improve accessibility, don’t overwhelm your visitors with information. Also by curating your content you reduce the amount of data you to configure for accessibility.
- Make Your Text Readable: your text should be formatted for readability. There should be proper contrast between your text and the background colors, which you can easily adjust using an online background remover. Proper color contrast is covered under the WCAG guidelines. Also, avoid using all capital letters in your titles and headings. Not only is this hard to read, it can confuse screen reader software. Finally, properly align your text to make it easier to read, as improperly aligned text can be hard to read for some people, including those with dyslexia.
- Ensure Your PDFs Are Accessible: when designing your website it is common to use PDFs for various documents and to allow for visitor downloading. PDFs support accessibility features such as text for images, form controls, labels, and more. By correctly configuring your PDFs, you ensure visitors can use accessibility tools to read them.
- Avoid Distracting Graphics: while photos and other visual elements can greatly improve a website, it is important to ensure they are not distracting to visitors. Distractions are one blinking or scrolling content that starts without user input, two that are in parallel with other information, and three last for over five seconds. Distractions are a problem for all visitors. However, they can be notably distracting for visitors with ADHD.
- Have Focus Rings Enabled: not every visitor can use a mouse to click content and engage with a website’s content. This can often be due to physical or neurological elements. Such users often use keyboard entries to engage with websites. A focus ring highlights what part of a website your keyboard is focused on such as a link or fillable form. This element is not always enabled on every website and this can make it very difficult to use for visitors using screen readers.
- Avoid Common Errors: even the most popular websites can have formatting and design issues. The most common issues encountered by website visitors are low-contrast text, a lack of alternative text for images, links that do not go anywhere or link to anything, input forms, missing labels, and missing document language indicators to explain what language the content of your site is in.
- Describe Non-Written Content: this means that when you highlight or place your mouse pointer over an image there should be a written description. This helps users that have visual impairments or may have images turned off due to data limits. Also, videos and audio files should have subtitles and transcripts to assist visitors with hearing impairments or disabilities.
Final Thoughts
Good design is one of the most important considerations when designing a webpage and that includes accessibility. By focusing on making your website accessible to all visitors you ensure everyone who visits your website can engage with its content in a way that works for them.
