Having an accessible website means that more people can use your website and the information that you share. There are a couple of checks you can do yourself before publishing an article to make sure your article can be read and understood by as many people as possible. Did you know Yoast SEO and the block editor, the default content editor in WordPress, have built-in tools that can warn you about common mistakes and help you test your content? Here’s a list of four things that you can easily check!
Writing accessible content is about making sure that your content can be accessed and understood by all your website’s visitors, including people with visual or hearing impairments and people who are scrolling your content in a hurry. Of course, that’s reason enough to improve the accessibility of your website. But search engines, such as Google, also stress the importance of the accessibility of your site, as you can read in this post.
We have built Yoast SEO to help you optimize and structure your content and improve readability. The tools in the plugin help you write accessible content, while you are working on improving your website’s SEO. Moreover, the WordPress block editor allows you to do some quick checks to make sure you don’t accidentally exclude visitors from enjoying your content. Let’s dive in.
You can find a more technical post about accessibility tips over in our Dev Blog, if you’d prefer to read that!
1. Add text alternatives for media
You should always have a text alternative to important media files including images, video and audio. Without text alternatives, search engines and visitors with visual or hearing impairments may have problems understanding the content of your page.
How to test if your images are accessible
You should first check if your content has images of text that you can remove and replace with plain text. Images of text have several disadvantages that make them less accessible compared to plain text. You can not use browser settings to resize or change the color of the text or image backgrounds. So people with sight problems, color blindness or visual disturbance might have difficulty seeing it. Images also increase the loading time of your page. Both the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and Google advise against using images of text.
Next, you want to make sure that all images have an alternative text (AKA alt tags). Yoast SEO analysis will warn you if there are images that are missing alt texts, and if the image is missing the keyphrase in these too.
The alternative text describes the purpose of the image. How long an alternative text should be can depend on your language, but the recommendation is to use less than 125 words.
When an alt text is not enough
Sometimes, you need more than an alt text to describe an image. When you are showing complex charts or maps, describe
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This article was written by Carolina Nymark and originally published on SEO blog • Yoast.