Importance of Accessible Web Design

The success of a website depends largely on how easily it can be accessed by the users. Enabling your users to find your website is one thing and helping them in exploring the various sections of the site is another. While you can enhance the visibility of your site through intense SEO strategies, you need to take several other measures to create an accessible web design.

The core reason for having accessible web design is that it simplifies the process of exploring a website. If you don’t work on improving your site’s accessibility, chances are high that the visitors leaving it in a short period of time. The web developers must pay attention to the following reasons for having accessible website design:

Physical Disabilities- The purpose of creating a website is to make it accessible to all the members of the targeted market, irrespective of their physical conditions. While physically abled people might be able to access your site with ease, users with visual disabilities, hearing disorders and other physical conditions may not be able to reach out to you even if they might have the potential of becoming your customers. A person with partial or complete visual disability will not be able to understand images that are not accompanied with their text descriptions.

Moreover, a website design that does not accommodate viewing through a non-visual browser is inaccessible for the visually impaired. Similarly, people with hearing disabilities face difficulty in understanding audios played on some websites. There are other physical disabilities as well that make the site inaccessible for most of them.

Mental disabilities- people with cognitive and neurological disorders can often find it difficult to navigate through a site that has a relatively complex web design. Inconsistent navigation and distracting images and animations can make things worse for people with such disabilities, making the sites inaccessible for them.

The way people access and use the Internet- This is another way by which a web developer can make the website completely inaccessible for people. People who access the Web through mobile phones and web-TV cannot access your site if it does not have a mobile version.

Several other reasons that make a website design inaccessible for people include low bandwidth users, noisy environment, low literacy level among the users and language barriers.

In order to improve the accessibility of the website design, the web developer must consider the following factors:
Avoiding tables for the layout- Using tables in the layout is one of the common mistakes by web developers during website design. A table-less web design enhances the accessibility of the web design. Moreover, screen reader and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) can also enhance the design and make it more accessible for the disabled.
Designing for different screen resolutions- The ease of using a web design is determined by its accessibility on different media such as mobile phones. Different versions of the web design should be built by the web developers to make it widely accessible.

Using comprehensible language- This is the golden rule in web design-simple design and content is a must if you want to more people to reach out to you. Simple and useful content is necessary to enhance the site’s accessibility.

Supporting the content with audios- For users with visual disabilities and low literacy levels would obviously prefer to listen to the content, rather than read it. This is why the web developers should add some audios that highlight the key features on the web page.
Simplifying the navigation- Easy navigation is another important factor to consider while creating a website. The users, with disabilities and otherwise, should be able to explore the website and reach the point where they started from with ease.