In this post I’m going to show you why it is so important to make your WordPress website more accessible, and introduce simple tools that anyone can use to increase accessibility for everyone. Why? Because your ultimate goal is to get as many people as possible to visit your website. How can you expect to do that if you’re not making your site accessible to all?
Furthermore, most of us focus on finding magic ways of driving high volumes of traffic to our site using the latest social media marketing strategies and search engine optimization methods, but what a lot of us forget about is this: The folks that have already found you need to be able to easily navigate around your website.
This is extremely important, because just like in a brick and mortar business situation, people come in all types, shapes and sizes. Ultimately, you want those who have taken the time to visit your establishment to spend some time looking around, spend some money, come back often, and best of all, bring others back with them.
If you weren’t interested in website accessibility before, you should be now. With that said, let’s crack on!
What is Website Accessibility?
Let’s take a moment to understand what we are talking about.
Website accessibility refers to the practice of removing barriers that prevent interaction with, or access to websites, by people with disabilities. When sites are correctly designed, developed and edited, all users have equal access to information and functionality.
So we’re really talking about the practice of removing barriers. That may sound complicated, but it’s really not. For example, a barrier in your website can be something as simple as not creating a visible and meaningful title (i.e. text that will appear as a tooltip) for a link.
If you’re an average internet traveler and you are suddenly let down by the lack of a little effort on the part of the website designer and/or webmaster to make his or her site easier to navigate, just imagine what a person with a vision disability is feeling right now.
The Internet Through Others’ Eyes
Have you ever wondered what it’s like for a sense-impaired or otherwise mentally or physically disabled person to browse the Internet? Possibly not. I encourage you to take some time to do so right now, because it could change the way you create and run websites from now on. Let’s explore some of the challenges that face many web users:
- Visual: impairments including blindness, various common types of low vision and poor eyesight, various types of color blindness.
- Motor/Mobility: e.g. difficulty or inability to use the hands, including tremors, muscle slowness, loss of fine muscle control, etc., due to conditions such as Parkinson’s Disease, muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy, stroke.
- Auditory: Deafness or
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This article was written by Tom Ewer and originally published on WPExplorer.