Accessibility is making sure that your website is as usable as possible for visitors that have a disability.

It’s quite common for accessibility to be an afterthought, however a great website will be accessible as part of its core design. This is why if the recommendations in the above chapters are followed (especially around website structure, navigation and usability), chances are your website will already be fairly accessible. Below is just a list of some other considerations that have not yet come up in any of the chapters. It is by no means definitive and we recommend looking at a larger primer or even at an authoritative source, such as the W3C quick reference for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. For Australia specifically, equal access is required by the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, and you can find a lot of useful information about how this applies to website usability on this page.

Website text

• Make sure text is text: When your website presents text, is it actually in legible text? A lot of websites hide functional text inside images (see below) and other non-text items, which would make them non-accessible to people with screen readers.
• Use contrasting colours: Many popular website themes present main text that’s almost light grey on a default background that’s white. This might be an attempt to not be too “in your face” but a lot of people will not easily be able to see it.
• Size your text appropriately: 20 years ago it would have been fine for a website to have the same text size as the PDF of an academic paper, but expectations have changed. Although there aren’t a lot of definitive studies, what’s out there does suggest that increasing font size to something more readable improves conversion. Either way, a font that’s too small will decrease visitor comprehension.

Use of a keyboard

• How much of your website can be used by someone with just a keyboard? If the answer is everything then you’re probably in good shape. If not you are presenting barriers to people whose setup would only have a key-based input device.
• Nav menus and forms are the main things to pay attention to. Website code standards do specify how to make it possible to navigate through them item-by-item or field-by-field but a lot of popular themes and CMSes may not have that functionality enabled.

Media

• Add ALT text to images: This is an HTML property of an image which describes what the image has. These are used by screen readers but also help your images rank for relevant image searches. Unless the image is purely decorative, every image should have one.
• Caption your videos: whether you’re using a 3rd party solution (eg. embedded YouTube or Vimeo players) or your own, they should be captioned and the captions should be in actual caption files which make them readable. Many times a video would provide captions but hard-coded into the video, which is similar to putting text inside an image in terms of readability.

Personalisation and Plugins

• Depending on the website you may want to let users make personalisations about things like font size, font and day/night mode on their own.
• There are plenty of plugins that can help with this, and many of them like AccessiBe also automatically scan for (or even fix) other accessibility issues.