Digital Trends
Aside from allowing more people to access and use your website, there are many benefits for ensuring your website is accessible. Here are a few:
- Larger user base
- Potential revenue increase
- Higher search engine rankings
- Community building
- Meeting legal compliance
In the United States, it’s reported that 27% of the population lives with some sort of disability, which is just over 9,000,000 people. From this group, 63.8% have regular access to the Internet—amounting to 18.9% of the American Internet population.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are considered the standard for online accessibility. They report that 90% of websites don’t meet even the basic compliance for accessibility, which includes text, images, sounds, structure, and presentation.
Why This Matters
Not having an accessible website doesn’t just limit who can use your resources—it’s against the law.
In both the United States and Canada, there is legislation in place requiring websites to follow the globally accepted WCAG standards.
Here are four tips to make websites more accessible:
- Ensure every page has an adequately defined heading structure (users relying on screen readers often jump from header to header)
- Create content that is well-displayed and easy to read
- Links should be descriptive and distinguished from other text
- Content images should have descriptive alt text
Next Step
To learn more about why accessibility matters in website design, how it can benefit your organization and consider updates you can make to your own website to make it more accessible, click here to read more.