Simple Ways To Improve Your Website Accessibility

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These are some simple steps you can implement today to improve the accessibility of your website.

Colour And Contrast
Many people need extreme contrast between the text and background colour in order to be able to read your text. If your text is dark blue, avoid using a light blue background colour.

Using colour to convey information or request an action from the user should also be avoided, for example telling someone to 'clïck the red button to continue' is not much help to a person who cannot distinguish red colours. It seems obvious, but it's overlooked on many thousands of websites.

Font Sizes
Font sizes should be relative rather than absolute. Absolute font sizes, those measured in points or pixels should be avoided as they prevent the visitor from resizing text. If someone cannot read your page they are simply going to leave.

Relative font sizes allow your visitors to display the text on your website in a size that suits them best. These font sizes can be specified as a percentage, for example the base font for a web page may be 100percent, headers could be 120percent and so on.

Using Tables For Layout
Almost all websites use tables to a layout a page. Tables are easy to understand and achieve the desired layout quickly and easily. However, you should avoid them as a layout tool as much as possible.

Tables can cause the size of your pages to increase dramatically slowing download times, they often require the use of transparent images to achieve the proper layout and they make it extremely difficult for screen readers to convey the information on a page correctly to their users. Screen readers are programs which read out the information on a webpage to someone who cannot see that information for themselves.

Rather than using tables to format your pages you should start using CSS-based layouts. CSS offers you greater precision when laying out your pages, decreases the amount of HTML required for formatting and makes it much easier for screen readers to interpret your pages correctly.

Provide A Text Only Version
A text-only version of your website can help users with visual disabilities. However, unless your content is stored in a database, creating a text only version doubles your workload and makes it more difficult to update your content.

This is where the Betsie parser is useful. Betsie, developed for the BBC website is a PERL script which produces a simplified text only version of a web page that allows text-to-speech converters and screen readers to correctly read out the contents of the page. Betsie also allows those with visual impairments to read computer screens easier. Find out more about Betsie.