Whether your business is large or small, a beautifully designed and well-maintained website is a powerful asset. This online platform helps you communicate your brand’s values, reach new customers, and build stronger relationships with your audience. As such, it is essential that your website is actually designed to accommodate as many potential visitors as possible.
When it comes to visitor accommodation, a majority of websites have some room for improvement. To provide the best experience to your website’s visitors and attract a broader audience, you need to understand website accessibility, and why it is so essential to you as a business owner.
What Exactly Is Accessibility?
The term “accessibility” can apply to almost any part of life. Think of it as the ability to get something done more easily. Examples of everyday accessibility include ramps next to staircases or the verbal messages you hear at crosswalks.
Accessibility has grown to include more than physical accommodations. Now, more people than ever are also focusing on online accessibility. Accordingly, it is important to consider accessibility throughout your web design OKC.
Why Is Website Accessibility Necessary for Business Owners?
There are many factors to consider to ensure that you can get the most out of your web design OKC – one essential component is accessibility. So, why exactly is this so important for business owners?
1. Increasing Web Accessibility Is the Right Thing to Do
By making your website more accessible, you make the design as usable as possible, for as many people as possible, and on as many devices as possible. If your brand’s core values include qualities like kindness, hospitality, and inclusivity, increasing your website accessibility will help you authentically show that to your audience.
2. Improved Accessibility Can Benefit Larger Audiences
Over 40 million adults in the United States have a disability. These individuals may have visual, hearing, mobility, and/or cognitive impairments – all of which can lead to difficulties utilizing some digital platforms. By making your website more accessible, you provide a better experience for your visitors with disabilities.
You can make your website more accessible by considering the following during your design and development phases:
- Keyboard navigation. Individuals with certain motor impairments may have difficulty using a mouse. Making your website keyboard navigation-friendly can help them use your website with ease.
- Screen readers. If someone is blind or visually impaired, they will likely use a screen reader when visiting your website. Make sure your content is informative and helpful, even without visuals.
- Potential seizure risks. Consider limiting the use of animated gifs, strong parallax effects, and other design elements that could potentially trigger a seizure in visitors.
The W3C outlines more essential considerations in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. By implementing these practices, you can create a web design OKC that accommodates all of your visitors – helping users have the great experience they deserve!
3. Accessibility-Friendly Designs Are SEO-Friendly
If you want to grow your audience, then it is important to think about search engine optimization. One crucial factor of SEO is making your website more user-friendly – a focus shared by website accessibility measures. As such, by enhancing your website’s accessibility, you may also improve your search result rankings.
4. Good Accessibility Solutions Are Required by Law
The 1990s Americans with Disabilities Act was created to protect people with disabilities from discrimination, helping these individuals get access to both public and private spaces. Now, those places include digital spaces. As such, web accessibility is more than a “helpful thing” you can do to make your website better. It is a requirement. Modern websites should be compliant with ADA and WCAG standards.
A lot goes into making a website more accessible. Making updates according to the WCAG 2 Checklist is a good way to start. According to the checklist, your website should be:
- Perceivable. Your website’s content should be available to the senses of sight, hearing, and/or touch.
- Operable. The design’s forms, controls, and navigation should be operable for users of various abilities.
- Understandable. The information you share and the user interface operations should be sensible.
- Robust. All content must be capable of being reliably interpreted by users and assistive technologies.
Adjusting your website’s design and updating the content based on this checklist will help your website effectively communicate with all of your visitors.
Creating Your Accessible Web Design OKC
Our design team would love to help you build a website that represents your unique brand and gives your audience the positive experience they deserve. We design with accessibility in mind and have thoroughly researched accessibility tools that can strengthen your website’s accessibility. Get in touch to design your website with myheartcreative.
