Website accessibility is both the right thing to do and the smart thing to do.
In addition to making your content usable to people who are blind, deaf, or have mobility or cognitive impairments, it also helps improve the usability of your site. And like they say, Google is blind, so an accessible website is also a search engine optimized (SEO friendly) website.
Easy things every web designer can do to improve accessibility include:
- Use proper, semantic HTML.Among other things, use header tags (h1, h2, etc.) only to designate headers/subheaders; do not use them to simply resize your text. Well-coded WordPress themes will handle this automatically, but be careful not to misuse header tags in individual posts and pages.
- Label all links with useful text. “Click here” is not useful.
- Use “label” on all forms so that each field can be read by a screen reader.
- Include a “skip navigation” link as the first text of a page so that people with screen readers can skip past your menu to the actual page content. This is built into the WordPress Twenty Ten theme.
- Use alt text for all important images. Use empty alt attributes (alt = ” “) for purely decorative images. Don’t label buttons alt = “button”. In WordPress in the “insert media” area of your post/page editor, you can set alt tags, and modify them if necessary in the HTML view option.
- Don’t rely on color alone to convey meaning. This is particularly important with link text. Links should be underlined or have a different visual style.
- Make sure your theme incorporates sufficient color contrast between background and text.
- Don’t rely on images alone to convey important concepts (such as logos, page titles). If you have a banner image, be sure to have an alt tag, and even better, also include the text somewhere on the page.
Check your site for basic accessibility compliance using the following tools:
- Evaluate your site with WAVE, the Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool
- Evaluate your site’s color contrast using the JuicyStudio Luminosity Colour Contrast Ratio Analyser
- Review a checklist of accessibilty issues from The Enabled Web.
The AIR (Accessible Internet Rally) site has a great tutorial on basic web accessibility.
For more reasons/ways to evaluate your site, visit WebAIM (Web Accessibility in Mind) and The Enabled Web.