Designing your website for accessibility is important for several reasons. The first of which is ADA compliance. You’re likely familiar with how the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) impacts physical locations like stores, restaurants, and other public buildings. These places need to provide accessible entrances, restrooms, and more to be ADA compliant. What you might not realize is that you also need to design your web content for accessibility.
Additionally, accessibility extends to include situational impairments. For instance, a person in a noisy environment may not be able to hear the audio in a video on your website and would benefit from a transcript or captions.
When you design for accessibility, you ensure that your audience can fully benefit from the content you’ve worked so hard to provide them.
What Does It Mean for a Website to Be Accessible?
To be fully accessible, the content on your website should fulfill a set of web content accessibility guidelines. By following these guidelines, you ensure that anyone visiting your website can access all the information and services provided.
A lot goes into designing for accessibility, so it can be helpful to work with an SEO consulting service to make sure that you’re in the clear.
Designing your website for accessibility can include:
● Making text and graphics large, clear, and easy to read
● Providing transcripts and captions for any audio content
● Structuring pages and menus for easy navigation
● Ensuring your content is compatible with tech like screen readers & eye trackers
● Offering a customer service chat option as well as a telephone option
● And much more
How Accessibility Benefits You Too
As we mentioned before, web accessibility is important because it ensures that your audience can fully enjoy the content you’ve put time, money, and effort into creating. But it goes beyond that. It’s also beneficial for search engine optimization (SEO).
When you prioritize accessibility, what you’re really doing is prioritizing user experience (UX). A better user experience means that your visitors stay on your site longer, click through more pages, and are more likely to make purchases.
On top of that, Google performs website accessibility scans in order to assign your site a score that factors into an SEO algorithm. With a higher accessibility score, you have a better chance of ranking higher on the search engine results page (SERP). You can perform an accessibility audit to see how your site currently fares.
If you’re not sure about the accessibility of your content, consider contacting the
Slyde Associates Content & SEO Team. Slyde experts can help you assess how accessible your website currently is, identify any problem areas, and make updates to improve your website and SEO. In doing so, you can maximize the potential of your content by ensuring that it’s friendly to everyone in your target audience.
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