When it comes to web content, hardly anyone talks about accessibility or knows anything about it. However, it’s essential to make the most of all options in this hyper-competitive business environment. That is where content accessibility comes into play.
On top of that, working on this aspect of your website will help you create a stronger brand with great values. Providing a fantastic user experience with your content was a thing of improvisation in the past, but today we have the best practices and data available.
You only have to be willing to use them to your advantage. Just because you’re producing content doesn’t mean that you’re too cool to follow specific guidelines that ultimately bring you results.
What are the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines?
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are an international standard set by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). This standard defines making your web content accessible to people with special needs, neurological disabilities, learning issues, language problems, cognitive or speech impairments, visual disabilities, etc.
With these guidelines, you can make your content more usable and accessible to older people and regular users.
The W3C released the first WCAG in 1999, and the current standards are WCAG 2.0 and WCAG 2.1. These two are pretty similar, but the 2.1 version includes additional requirements for mobile accessibility.
Crucial principles of the WCAG
These guidelines include four essential design principles that outline how content becomes accessible. Accessibility is a vast topic that can focus on coding approaches to legal regulations. However, you can apply the four WCAG principles to any aspect of accessibility. Here are short descriptions of each.
- Perceivable
The first primary thing content should allow users is to process information quickly. Avoid using formats for your content that are difficult to process. That also means giving textual content for people who can’t hear and audio content for those with sight problems.
It’s vital to add various assistive technologies to help users consume content differently. Just think about it: are there pieces of content color-blind people, people with low vision, or people with hearing loss can’t perceive on your site?
- Operable
Operability is another essential principle. After all, people need to be able to operate and use your content with different tools. For example, many people can’t use a mouse, so it’s a good idea to include keyboard operation.
Usage should be more forgiving as people with disabilities are more likely to make mistakes. Include confirming options, cancellations, warnings, and instructions for completing actions.
- Understandable
Just because your content can be usable and appropriately perceived, it doesn’t mean people can easily understand it. All of your content should have concise and clear language that is easy to understand. When someone acts, they should expect logical outcomes.
Implement consistency across your content and include forms with clear labels and logical flow. Even though your content should be different, it should have a familiar structure.
- Robust
People use various technologies, and you should optimize your content to perform seamlessly across different browsers, devices, and platforms. However, that doesn’t mean that you should optimize for old web browsers or Windows smartphones. Offer flexibility but within the “regular” limits.
How content accessibility helps
Content accessibility guidelines aren’t just about meeting standards. You can get real benefits that will help your business and your customers. Here are some advantages you should know.
Better user experience
At its core, content accessibility is about user experience focusing on easy content navigation, responsiveness, readability, and the ability to view and interact with it in various ways, depending on users’ needs. Content is all about user experience, especially since Google’s SEO guidelines emphasize that.
More people will see your content.
The more accessible your content is, the more people will click on it. All people with disabilities will respect that you’ve made things easier for them and made your content easy to access.
However, it’s not only about people with disabilities, as typical users will also check out what you have to offer.
More people are likely to consume your content.
When producing content, you should know that persuading people to click on your content is equally challenging as making them stay and consume it.
Modern consumers have short attention spans and are used to having a perfect experience. If they don’t get it, they will leave, which you can’t allow.
Conclusion
To sum things up, there are four crucial areas of your content you should check when assessing the level of accessibility. Make your text large enough and structured adequately with short paragraphs, sentences, and lists.
Create a consistent content hierarchy with a logical flow to make things easier to understand. It’s not just working on your content but also making it readily available to everyone.