How to provide your visitors with accessible website content

Key quotes:

• "Alt (alternative) text allows visitors to your site with visual disabilities to access your images."
• "To do this, you’ll go to Settings > Accessibility, and from here, check the box that says “Compose image descriptions.” Once this is enabled, you’ll have the option to add alt text to your images before tweeting them."
• "Videos have no description feature, so you’ll need to add alt text for these in the body of your tweet."
• "Headers are the best way to highlight important content, to draw the visitor’s attention to something specific, and they do so much more successfully for visitors with a visual disability than, say, colored or bolded text."
• "Just like your website, the last thing you want to do is present a subscriber with a newsletter email they can’t access because unlike visiting your website where all a user can do is close it and hope to find a better one, email gives us the power of the dreaded spam and unsubscribe buttons."
• "Are you personally going to have a reader that sues you because you didn’t caption your videos or use alt text for your images?."

Key quotes:

• "courts and the Department of Justice (DOJ) have continually referenced the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 Level AA success criteria as the standard to gauge whether websites are accessible."
• "Instead of the pretend-to-get-stuff-done maneuvering above, start by diving into WCAG 2.0 AA and taking care of the biggest obstacles to accessibility and most common lawsuit complaints."
• "What the flexibility language is acknowledging is that although WCAG is currently the best solution for determining whether a website is accessible, it’s an imperfect standard."
• "#3 Don’t Pay for Automated Scans The way you get started with accessibility is typically you 1) audit and then 2) remediate your website."
• "And while you figure out your plan of action and are in the process of making your website accessible, you might get hit by a demand letter or lawsuit."
• "Get my WCAG checklists and sign up to get my plain English guide on what all of WCAG 2.0 AA + 2.1 AA success criteria actually mean (free): Sign up free at Accessible.org Read more of my articles on Web Accessibility and ADA Compliance: Lowering your risk of a demand letter Why accessibility toolbars/widgets/plugins aren’t compliant Does every website need to be ADA compliant?."

Key quotes:

• "All images that appears on your website should have an alt text as this serve as text replacement when the image fails to load and also helps give more information about the image with users with vision impairment while using assistive technology like screen readers."
• "To implement the alt text in pure HTML, you can see the use case below: If an image is purely used for decoration only and it does not serve as a piece of crucial information then you can leave the alt attribute out or empty so that the screen reader user is not distracted from the more important content on the page."
• "When working with headings, you might want to follow the guide below: When building an accessible site, you must take colors in mind carefully as this will have a lot of impact on users especially the ones with visual disabilities."
• "Table captions (HTML5) can be used to give additional information to users about how best to read and understand the table relationships When content updates dynamically (i.e."

Key quotes:

• "We specialise in a hospitality niche, and since our clients are providing a service to their own customers (a room to stay in as an easy example), accessibility is a huge part in our planning, design, development for our client’s content delivery."
• "The first level of compliance (Level A) helps for sure, many people will be able to use your site, but if you are truly looking to make your site compliant, especially if it is a legal requirement where your business is located, Level AA is the best direction to go in."
• "Creating your IA with accessibility in mind is no different than usual: it requires strong navigation, organisation of related content (pages, posts, etc) while keeping the needs and goals of the people visiting your site in mind."
• "Deliver content in a way that it is easy to understand, is presented in a logical flow, has proper use of visual and structural hierarchy (which is easily seen at a glance), and elements and content are discernible from each other and make sure your text is legible."

Key quotes:

• "Being ADA compliant isn’t the only reason you want your website to be easily accessible to those with disabilities."
• "Knowing how certain disabilities affect the user experience for these individuals can help you make better choices and ensure your website is accessible to the greatest number of people."
• "While you can’t do a great deal about this from your end, there are apps available to help make the navigation of websites easier for individuals with limited hand motor skills."
• "Providing the ability for closed captioning is one of the most common ways of remaining ADA compliant and allowing visitors to know what your content is about."
• "There are two things that can make the website more accessible for individuals with these types of motor disorders."
• "Not having a way to effectively communicate is one of the most frustrating things a website visitor can experience."

Transcript: How can you improve your pages on the nWTC website so they're accessible to all including those with disabilities I'm going to talk about that in this video hi everyone this is Kristen Rae Springer nWTC webmaster did you know that at nWTC were required by federal law to make sure our website is accessible to people with disabilities it's not only the law it's the right thing to do millions of individuals in the United States have a visual hearing ambulatory or cognitive disability as a website content editor you play a key role in improving the accessibility of the nWTC website in this video I'll give you ten tips to help you provide a better experience for our website visitors who are blind deaf or differently-abled number one always put alternative text on images you can add alternative text to an image from the insert image or media dialog box to access it from an image already added to the page first check out the page open the content block by clicking configure if the image is in a widget zone right-click on the image and choose properties enter some alternative text in the alternative text input box... See more →