Every website should attract as many site visitors as possible. Despite this, some website owners don’t make sure their website can be used by everyone. There are millions of internet users that rely on accessible websites, and if you don’t work to understand their needs, you’ll miss out on a lot of traffic.

Millions of internet users have special needs, disabilities, and impairments that can make it difficult to use some websites. By designing your website with accessibility in mind, you can make your site much more welcoming to as many users as you can.

You should consider how users with visual impairments, hearing impairment, physical disabilities, photosensitive seizures, or cognitive disabilities will use your website.

Make Sure Your Site Is Keyboard-Friendly

This step is perhaps the most important. If a website is accessible, it should work without a mouse. This is because a lot of assistive technologies use keyboard-only navigation. It must be possible to use all of the major features on your site using a keyboard and nothing else. One of the benefits of JAMstack is being able to build with this in mind.

Most navigation with a keyboard is done using the tab key. This jumps between areas on a page that have keyboard focus, like links, buttons, and forms. Make sure all your web content and navigation can be accessed like this.

To test it, navigate your site without your mouse. If you can’t access something, you know which areas need to be changed.

Make Sure All Content Is Easily Accessible

Make sure that all the content on the page is accessible. Usually, this isn’t difficult, but dynamic content can be a problem.

Dynamic content changes without the page having to reload. This can be a problem if the site doesn’t inform assistive tools of the change that has happened. Some screen readers only read the site as it appears when it first loads. You need to tell screen readers that something has changed, or the user will miss some content.

Add Alt Text to All Images

Alt text, or alternative text, is as a replacement for the image if it fails to load. Alt text is also used by screen readers to read the pictures. You can use alt text to describe an image, giving context to users who can’t see the image and would otherwise miss it.

Alt text also improves your site’s SEO. It gives search engines more information to crawl. Write descriptive summaries of your images, and include your keywords where they make sense.

Choose Your Colours Carefully

Colour-blindness is often thought of as an inability to see colour at all. In fact, colours are on a spectrum that people see differently. You should make sure that the colours on your site contrast enough so that everyone can tell the difference between various elements on the page.

The most important thing is to make sure that text stands out clearly against the background. Set a dark colour against a light one, and make sure they don’t bleed into one another.