Accessibility

Overview

Accessibility is the practice of making your websites usable by as many people as possible. We traditionally think of this as being about people with disabilities, but the practice of making sites accessible also benefits other groups such as those using mobile devices, or those with slow network connections.

Building accessible sites benefits everyone:

• Semantic HTML, which improves accessibility, also improves SEO, making your site more findable.

• Caring about accessibility demonstrates good ethics and morals, which improves your public image.

• Other good practices that improve accessibility also make your site more usable by other groups, such as mobile phone users or those on low network speed. In fact, everyone can benefit from many such improvements.

• Did we mention it is also the law in some places?

A good foundation of accessibility for people with cognitive impairments includes:

• Delivering content in more than one way, such as by text-to-speech or by video.

• Easily understood content, such as text written using plain-language standards.

• Focusing attention on important content.

• Minimizing distractions, such as unnecessary content or advertisements.

• The consistent webpage layout and navigation.

• Familiar elements, such as underlined links blue when not visited and purple when visited.

• Dividing processes into logical, essential steps with progress indicators.

• Website authentication is as easy as possible without compromising security.

• Making forms easy to complete, such as with clear error messages and simple error recovery.