There are two main reasons. The first that it's a legal requirement in almost all countries that you make websites that anyone can use, even if they have reduced abilities. This isn't the best reason, but for organizations with legal compliance is a priority. It can be a very powerful one. The second issue is that we find that accessibility is closely connected with general usability and search engine optimization (SEO). When we do things to improve accessibility,
we end up improving both of these other topics. It turns out that search engine optimization and accessibility have more in common than you might think. They both need to deal with technology that's trying to understand the pages. In the case of accessibility, assistive technology needs to present it to users with reduced abilities who perhaps cannot see it or hear it. So assistive technologies will attempt to present web pages in an appropriate form for those users. For search engines,
the Web crawlers need to understand the contents of the pages so they can be indexed correctly. So the structure of the content needs to make sense in both cases, cascading style sheets can work wonders in making a messy HTML page look brilliant. But style sheets are complex to interpret. Assistive technology and search crawlers may simply ignore them. That means if you're relying on style sheets to present your content in a meaningful order, those adjustments go away. Here are some general guidelines for implementing accessibility in web design.
One of the keys to accessibility is to design for assistive technologies or to at least be aware of assistive technologies. When you're designing, if you're looking at visual impairment then the screen readers are the main assistive technology there. Screen readers take the contents of the screen and read it out to you. They are now built into most platforms by default, including smartphones. But if you want to ensure your website works well, the screen is you should try it out. An accessibility specialist may be helpful in that respect.
Screen readers deal with written content, but an important issue is that we need to provide non text content in alternative media. This is the dreaded ALTtext that you are frequently prompted for when creating images. This is because screen readers are great for reading out text in HTML, but if it happens to be text embedded in an image, it has little hope. And for meaning pictorial images Despite the rise of AI, users are likely to get a description
of what an image shows rather than what it was intended to mean. And just as a quick side note, ALT text with decorative images should always be empty and empty ALT-tag tells assistive technology that is not important and can be ignored. If you've got video clips or audio recordings on your site, you need to provide text alternatives for that. Closed captions and transcripts are best and are now provided automatically by many tools. Of course, one of the real usability advantages of text
alternatives is that you can search them. So if you were looking on your internet or on a website for something that somebody said, then you could find that in the transcript and have the entire text available to you there. But most changes for accessibility do benefit all users, especially when you start to think about how can we simplify this layout? How can we make the whole thing easier to use?