For any programmer, designing for accessibility is an important consideration, as it allows people with disabilities or impairments can use and access your products, services, or contents. Accessibility should be added to the design process from the beginning, rather than added as a late addition.
In today’s digital era designing for easy usage is more important than ever. According to a survey, with over a billion people living with some type of disability, it’s important to ensure that websites and digital products are accessible to everyone.
Before starting to design, it is important to do your work and to know about some of the limitations and pain points for disabled people experience.
Reading about the best practices for building an easy user interface is a good starting point, such as the visual, audible, and behavioral design. Watching videos shows, how people with disabilities use these technologies in their daily lives (like screen readers or captioning services) can also be helpful. By checking out the list of resources provided by Google, W3C, and Microsoft, you can also provide additional recommendations.
The WCAG provides a huge range of recommendations for making web content, the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group sets designs the best practices for more accessibility. Whatever the ability or situation that users handle, there’s always a way to make your user experience and user interface more accessible.
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Here’re Some Tips and Best Practices to be Followed
Add proper alt text to images:
For the individuals, who can’t see, use alt text to provide access to the content of images including those people who uses screen readers or Braille output devices.
Alt text is supported by most of the document formats such as HTML, Microsoft Word, and Adobe PDF.
Use Proper Headings:
The ultimate use of headings and subheadings is to outline the page. Do not forget to add the heading levels.
Make Accessible PDFs:
To support headings and text for images, you can use “tagged PDF”; you can use the PDF Accessibility Checker that’s provided by Adobe Acrobat.
When to use PDF:
PDF makes a document’s appearance more accessible across operating systems and devices. However, try to use a similar format to HTML, which is much more accessible.
Add labels to form fields:
Use the HTML labeled element so that the screen reader users will know which labels will prompt with which form fields.
Mark tables correctly:
Use the HTML markup correctly to establish relationships between column and row headers and the data cells within their scope.
Check the language of text:
Some screen readers are multi-lingual, you can use markup to identify the default language of documents and of any text that is different from the default.
Provide eye-catching color contrast:
Make sure that foreground and background must have adequate color contrast. Various free tools can help in choosing
Avoid using small fonts:
Although users may be unaware that they can change the font size using the browser, still they use a reasonably large font size. Users can change it according to their desire.
Provide white space:
Provide plenty of white space between lines and blocks of text. This will help many users to easily track the text horizontally, and make the text easier to read.
Provide a noticeable indication of focus:
In CSS, you can use hover to make the page look more alive and easy to respond user’s mouse movements.
Use text, not images of text:
You have to use text instead of pictures of text, and can easily control its appearance using CSS. Pictures of text will become blurry when they get enlarged and take a long time to download, and become difficult for the website author to edit it.
Choose Words wisely:
Always keep your content simple to read and understand by the users. Many web authors use larger words and longer sentences than required.
Caption Your Video:
Captions provide a detailed description to all users. Various free, easy-to-use tools are available to support the process of transcribing and captioning videos.
Describe Your Video:
Make a script that includes brief descriptions of various important visual content. For those people who are unable to watch the video, you can also provide the video with a separate description line, either as timed text or recorded narration.
Provide a readable transcript:
Provide a readable transcript for video and audio so that the users who are deaf-blind can access the content easily. A transcript plays an important role for all users by allowing them tounderstand the content easily.
Choose accessible media players:
While choosing a media player, ask a few questions such as, Do this player support closed captions? Does it support the description? Can it be operated without a mouse? Are buttons and controls accessible to screen reader users? Able Player is a free player which is created keeping accessibility in mind by the University of Washington.
Use User-friendly website navigation menu:
When you create a navigation menu, put questions like; Can this menu be operated by keyboard? If yes, doing so is efficient or does it require various keystrokes? Consult credible resources such as a Graphic Design Company in Chandigarh for accessible design patterns.
CONCLUSION
While designing for accessibility, it is essential for creating inclusive experiences for all users.
By following the tips and best practices given above for designing accessible user experiences, you can create more inclusive and accessible user experiences that will benefit everyone.
Remember that, accessibility is not just a requirement to fulfill; it’s the right thing to do!