So you’ve spent some time (and money!) redesigning your website, writing content, taking engaging photos and videos. You’ve identified a team member to assist with regular maintenance to keep the site new and fresh. Think you’ve got this all wrapped up? Maybe, maybe not.
One important aspect to consider when doing website design is making your site accessible to those who have vision and hearing impairments. Imagine spending all that money on pretty pics and videos and a portion of the population can’t see or hear them? But there are ways to make your site both compliant with federal American with Disabilities Act (ADA) and available for those potential clients with impairments.
- First use, a web-based tool called a WAVE scanner to identify contrast and other issues on your site. The tool is free and available here: https://wave.webaim.org/ . Make sure all your website pages, not just the home page, are cleared of contrast issues. Certain combinations of colors may make reading your site challenging and need to be adjusted.
- Consider adding an accessibility widget like Equal Web https://www.equalweb.com/ . This will automatically adjust contrast on your site.
- Go through your website and add “alt text” to all the image files. This function will read a description of the photo to vision impaired individuals who may not be able to see the image for themselves. Also, make sure all videos have closed-captioning so the content is read to them.
- Make sure to add an accessibility policy to your site. The policy should address what you do to keep your site ADA compliant, provide a phone number for a user to reach someone if they have trouble navigating your site. It also should address any third-party applications, like Google maps, for which you as the primary business don’t have control over.