3 Common Mistakes to Avoid for Ensuring Web Accessibility – AccessiBe

In the case of building a website, the real value and reach of the website are related to its accessibility to all. Universality is one concept that the designers and developers need to ensure. The website should be accessible to all types of people irrespective of their gender, location, ethnicity, age, and most importantly, their physical and mental abilities. Accessibility mandates that the web content should easily be understandable to people with disabilities too. There are a lot of websites that are meant for people having disabilities. However, the need is not for special websites but for integrating accessibility features to all regular websites to make those accessible to disabled ones too.

AccessiBe ADA compliance guidance

For the understanding of web developers and the site owners, here we will discuss some of the common mistakes to be avoided while ensuring ADA compliance, as explained by the AccessiBe experts.

Noncompliance with color contrast

The font of the text and color schema in the background must be well synced to make the text notable and readable to people with eyesight compromises too. Any low contrast combinations may adversely affect the interpretation of the color-blind people. The improper color contract may be a challenge for the aged people, too, and people with reading disabilities and dyslexia, etc. The latest guidelines of WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 2.0 recommend that the right contract ratio for ensuring accessibility is 4.5:1 for the regular text on web pages and 3: 1 for the large font sizes as the 14-point bold texts.

Limited access through keyboard

All web browsers may use page display highly visible with an outline as a dotted or blue border. All these should be with keyboard focus. Users must be able to see this by clicking on the tab key while visiting a web page. Keyboard accessibility is very important as per the WCAG accessibility standards. There are people with some sort of motor neuron disabilities who can only make of keyboard to navigate through sites. People with partial eyesight also may use screen magnification by relying only on keyboards.

Compromising on alt text for images

Those with blindness or poor eyesight may be using screen readers to interpret the content of a page. This assistive software converts text and HTML elements on-page to speech. The screen readers cannot interpret an image as such but only by reading out the text which describes it. So, the developers need to provide accurate alt text for the images, which exactly defines the content of the image. The Google search engine also mandates proper alt text for SEO ranking.

There are a lot of things changing as per the mandates of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA 1990), which includes all the public access entities that cover websites, too, as per many court rulings interpreting the same. As per the titles under ADA, all these guidelines revolve around the need for accessibility to people with disabilities. AccessiBe offers tools and techniques for websites to ensure compliance, which you can effectively use to ensure WCAG compliance for your commercial websites.