Web accessibility is another vital aspect ensuring the success of the website. Web developers commit so many web accessibility mistakes while developing a website. Instead of making the site highly accessible, they put a question mark over its continuation with serious blunders. The main problem lies in carrying out too much experimentation without knowing the end result. Accessibility is a serious concern for many websites and can be overcome by adopting certain guidelines.
Alt texts are generally incorporated for images posted at the site to facilitate the understanding of physically handicapped people who make use of screen reader software to go through the site. The Alt text must be short and simple and adequately define the image. Unnecessary and lengthy definitions for images pose problems for screen reader to work through the page. There are certain images that beautify the site only. You don’t need to set Alt text for these images.
You’ll find so many links in a website quite close to each other. These adjoining links can create accessibility problem. Some of the old browsers are unable detect individual links and if you click on a specific link, all the nearby links are redirected to that web page too. So, all the adjoining links on a web page must have non-link text between them. In certain circumstances, web developers put invisible characters such as vertical bars between links. But, these characters might create confusion in the minds of screen reader users.
Enlarging text with the help of magnifying buttons has its own accessibility problems. It can cause the columns to move off screen to the left or right and go out of sight. Text magnification also creates confusion between headers and bold letters and is very difficult to distinguish. However, the use of tags solves the problem as they can be used as markers in the text to facilitate readability. The most widespread color combination on the Internet is black text on a white background. But, this particular color scheme is hardly readable on a computer screen. Instead of that, you can adopt color schemes like white on blue or green on black for a soothing effect on the eyes.
You may weigh the option of reversing the popular color scheme of black text on a white background. But, white on black creates so much contrast that it is still very difficult to read. You can try colors like blue, green or white on black or dark brown for better results.
The next accessibility problem is to do with the navigation system. Always keep your navigation far from complexities. If you have implemented one column design on your website, then you need to ensure that the first 5 screen-full of text is not your navigation. Make use of classes to hide sub-navigation. In order to simplify things, you need to incorporate the basic 1 or 2 levels of navigation at the top or bottom of the page.
In order to make your site more accessible, there is no justification of removing all the images. Do not alter or remove the content much. You can resort to zoom-layout option that is the same alignment of content as you find in a standard page. The only difference is it makes the text more legible for low-vision readers.
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