Why Web Accessibility is Important and What It should Cover

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When designing the website elements, it is very important to consider the special needs of various types of users in order to ensure accessibility. Many types of physical and cognitive disabilities may restrict people from accessing the website elements easily. People with disabilities may be using different assistive technologies in order to interact with the web content. There are virtual assistants and dedicated browsers to help users with disabilities. So, while creating websites, one should ensure that the website elements are compliant with the needs of these types of tools to easily interpret the page content for the disabled.

Is ADA compliance necessary? AccessiBe check

The Americans with Disabilities Act actually mandates the accessibility requirements for government services and other crucial public information websites. Most of the time, it may not be mandated to the small businesses, which used to cater to a specific category of limited people. However, W3C recommends the websites be accessibility compliant in order to make sure of avoiding any discrimination against people with disabilities. AccessiBe also recommends that for businesses, it is ideal to ensure that their website is accessible to all sorts of people and cater effectively to a wider category of users and customers.

Each person with disabilities may have a specific set of needs based on the way how they interact with the web. So, we are looking at some generalized issues which you may need to consider in website development. Further, we will discuss some of the common disabilities demanding accessibility needs. Having an insight into this will help you make your web pages more accessible.

Visual disability

Usage of font styles and colors is mandatory while catering to people with visual disabilities like color blindness. However, there are now very specific types of fonts and screen readers available to interpret a website’s content for blind people. There is specific software also used by them to access the website on a computer. There are specific display browsers and speech synthesizers also being used.

Hearing disability

For people with hearing difficulties, it is essential to provide captions for videos and audio files and the text interpretation of the audio files. Providing detailed transcripts of the audio content will be useful for several people.

People with the motion disabilities

People with Parkinson’s disease or tremors may not be able to use the mouse or keyboard properly. So, they may require other modes of interacting with the web pages. For this, you need to ensure easy navigability through touch responsiveness or voice control, etc. There may be people with cognitive disabilities, too, who may struggle with information overload. So, the text should be kept minimal, and you should also try to avoid any blinking banners or flashy graphics on the web pages.

AccessiBe puts forth many accessibility tools and features to be incorporated into your website for ensuring ADA compliance. These are only a few examples of disability-specific web page accessibility needs. There are many such use cases to be considered by the expert website developers to ensure accessibility before releasing the website.