What is Web Accessibility and How to Improve it?

In this article, let’s talk about Web Accessibility design.

What is Web Accessibility?

The two basic principles for web design accessibility are

• to create pages that transform gracefully and provide understandable content
• to facilitate browsing through the website.

An accessible web design website is one whose contents can be properly used by the greatest number of users. The most important thing to make a website accessible is to understand that people access the Web in many different ways.

Therefore, an accessible web design website should present information so that users can access it

• regardless of the hardware and software, they are using
• regardless of what physical and sensory skills used to interact with the computer.

Types of User Accessing Your Website

We know that not everyone uses the Internet to surf the same types of devices or the same way. Here are some examples of different types of users as are follows:

• A user using a graphical browser with all connectors or ‘plug-in’ installed. The browser is controlled mainly by the mouse and the keyboard sporadically (and hotkey access to forms). This is the most common situation, but it is not the only possible.
• A blind user can use a screen reader program to access the content displayed by the Explorer. Listen to the textual content of web pages using the sound card for speech synthesis or Braille is read by a special device.
• A user with visual impairments uses a screen magnifier to enlarge the image and trigger the largest sources available in the browser. If you can do it, off the colors defined in the pages for display with maximum contrast between text and background.
• A user can have mobility impairments that prevent you handle the mouse. However, handle all computer programs, including the web browser, exclusively from the keyboard and using accessibility aids the Windows 98 system.
• There are other users with slow Internet connections, or using older browsers or do not have the latest Flash and other connectors as. This is the case of some users from accessing or using other less developed access stations in public places countries.
• There are users accessing the web through laptop ‘palmtop’ and mobile phones very reduced graphical displays.

You have to put web design efforts for developing websites. By creating an accessible web design, you can minimize the effort.

How to Create Accessible Web Design?

The first principle of web design accessibility in web design is to create pages that transform gracefully and whose content is properly reproducible under different circumstances.

• You have to create pages that are accessible web design despite the mild physical or sensory impairments of cognitive users.
• We must also consider possible restrictions due to site access and technological barriers.

In this sense, the text is always accessible in web design. However, it is not much useful if you are creating text-only pages without graphics or an attractive visual layout.

In HTML, there are techniques to associate HTML alternate text for each non-text element of the page.

In addition, properly used graphics and multimedia elements contribute to improving the accessibility of the website. They help to achieve another important principle of accessible web design: understanding of content and easy navigation through the site.

With accessible website design, you make your website more responsive.

Improve Web Accessibility by Proper Navigation

This includes not only the use of clear and simple language but also providing understandable mechanisms for navigating within a page and between pages of the website.

By providing navigation tools and orientation information in pages, you can maximize the accessibility and usability of the website.

But as it has been said not all users can use visual clues such as image maps, background colors, contiguous frames or images that guide sighted users. Some users also lose contextual information when they can only see a portion of the page. This occurs when accessing the page word for word with speech synthesizers, braille or WAP phones or accessed by parties with small screens or screen magnifiers.

If you are developing an e-commerce website, you have to follow the different designs.

What’s your thought about web accessibility and how important is it? Let me know in the comment.