Many websites do not comply with WCAG accessibility guidelines, forcing people with disabilities to rely on assistive gadgets, which often lack full functionality. It can lead to significant monetary losses due to legal consequences and a negative user experience.

Easier accessibility benefits all users, including those without impairments, as it enhances the overall user experience. Therefore, it is crucial to dedicate time and resources to focus on website accessibility and ensure compliance with WCAG guidelines.

What Is Website Accessibility?

Website accessibility ensures that a site is usable by everyone, including those with disabilities. It involves considering various needs such as visual, auditory, motor, and cognitive impairments. Addressing accessibility from the beginning prevents the need for costly and time-consuming redevelopment later on.

Individuals with impairments or disabilities represent a substantial portion of the global population. According to the CDC reports, 27% of adults, or about one in four, have a disability. As a result, brands with inaccessible websites neglect a significant segment of the population. Additionally, the number of individuals with disabilities is projected to rise in the coming decades.

Therefore, it is imperative to ensure that your website and web applications are accessible to all users. Adhering to web accessibility checklists and best practices allows developers and testers to create inclusive websites efficiently. Integrating accessibility practices early, you comply with legal standards and contribute to a more inclusive and equitable web.

Best Practices to Ensure Easier Accessibility

Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web, emphasized that “The power of the web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.” This principle reflects the web’s original intent, but many websites fail to meet accessibility standards. Often, this occurs because speed in development is prioritized over inclusive design.

With this learning from Tim Berners-Lee, we have listed some best practices to address and resolve accessibility issues efficiently. With this list of best practices, you will find methods to achieve easier accessibility, focusing on user-centric approaches and effective testing methodologies. You can also ensure a more inclusive and seamless experience for all users.

Conduct Surveys and Research

The first step to making website accessibility easier is to conduct surveys and gather input from a diverse group. Surveys provide exact insights into what people with impairments expect from a website, which is difficult to brainstorm in a room with only non-impaired individuals. These insights will provide a real-life, personalized experience, assuming the survey questions are carefully crafted to target each aspect of the application.

Besides surveys, independent research will highlight recent problems and their solutions regarding website accessibility. This research can be based on users’ experiences and feedback or backed by research papers and new advancements documented in journals. It is important to understand that, like technology, web accessibility implementation styles change over time, and developers should be aware of such changes to ensure easier accessibility.

This step should be taken before starting the planning and implementation phase of the website.

Accessibility Starts From Day 0

The easiest way to achieve easier accessibility is to include it in the planning phase of the sprint or the product. With this approach, it becomes a part of the coding culture and not a separate entity that requires dedicated resources for inspection and maintenance. Including web accessibility in planning also helps shape the product correctly. If this is not the case, the product may evolve in a way that becomes irreversible and not as accessible as it should be for everyone.

Provide Feedback Options

Implementing accessibility comprehensively can be challenging, and developers may inadvertently overlook specific aspects crucial to users with disabilities. To enhance easier accessibility, offering users a feedback channel is crucial. This enables them to highlight gaps in accessibility and helps improve the experience for all users, ensuring a more inclusive digital environment. While legal actions for inaccessible websites are a last resort, providing feedback options empowers users to contribute early in the development process, fostering continual improvement towards easier accessibility.

In implementing a feedback option, developers should:

• Keep forms concise to prevent user frustration and abandonment. Divide longer forms into smaller panels if necessary.

• Provide contact options such as callbacks or emails to facilitate detailed, personalized feedback.

• Consider offering incentives to motivate user participation, as 33% of respondents seek rewards.

• If feasible, consider hiring a survey agency experienced in crafting effective questions for diverse user needs.

After getting the feedback, the next step is implementing the solutions to make the website more accessible to a larger audience. As a moral responsibility, it is important to prioritize easier accessibility over assessing each disability based on business revenue.

Use Structure on a Web Page

People with disabilities face challenges while reading an unstructured web page. This is true even with assistive technologies because they rely on how things have been organized and can understand a structured page better. To achieve an easier accessibility, make sure the following rules are followed on a web page:

• Create Regions: Identify and mark up regions on the page.

• Label Regions: Label the regions so that they are distinguishable and understandable by the user.

• **Structure Headings: **Structure the page into multiple nested headings based on their relationship with the parent heading.

• **Use Correct HTML Elements: **HTML contains tags that portray a specific meaning on the web page. Use specific tags as they help the assistive devices understand the meaning of that region and navigate across the page easily.

Structured web pages improve navigation for keyboard users and those using assistive technologies like screen readers, leading to easier accessibility across diverse user needs.

Use Descriptive Links

A web page has many links that target internal pages or external third-party websites. Visually impaired people use assistive technologies like screen readers to read out links and texts on which these links are embedded. If the developer has used descriptive links like this:

Ambiguous version: Read More
Long URL: https://www.lambdatest.com/accessibility-devtools

Users cannot figure out the context of these links and may never be able to navigate them. Instead, use texts and URLs such that they describe the page they are referring to. For instance, in the above case, it will become:

<a href="https://www.lambdatest.com/accessibility-devtools">Accessibility DevTools</a>

Something similar in the lines can be embedded in the URL as well.

Use Text Instead of Images With Text

To achieve easier accessibility, it’s vital to ensure compatibility with assistive technologies like screen readers, which often struggle with embedded text images. Despite their convenience in quickly designing UI elements, these images pose significant accessibility challenges.

Assistive technologies perceive the embedded text as inseparable from the image itself, rendering it inaccessible to visually impaired users and depriving them of crucial contextual information, especially on landing pages where such text communicates key business objectives.

Choosing text over images with embedded text requires more effort but greatly enhances accessibility. It ensures all users can access and understand content effectively regardless of impairments. This approach fosters a more inclusive user experience and supports the broader goal of accessibility in digital design.

Use Tables Wisely

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