Do you know anyone who is visually impaired? or someone with a disability that prevents them from using their hands or hearing? Do you ever think about how improving accessibility can help your SEO efforts too? Making your website accessible can create a better experience for all users and help your site rank higher in search engine results.
How will users be interacting with your content online? Do you have any confidence that your website is entirely accessible for people with disabilities?
It is beneficial for individuals, businesses, and society as a whole if the web is accessible to everyone. Making websites and apps accessible to people with disabilities is important for inclusion. Many websites and apps have poor development and lack accessibility, making them difficult for some people to use.
This article provides tips on how to make your site more accessible to users and improve the overall experience for everyone who visits your site. By making your site more accessible, you can ensure that everyone can enjoy the same level of content and functionality regardless of their ability or disability. In addition, you will learn why accessibility is essential for improving your SEO performance.
What Is Web Accessibility and Why It Is Important?
It is important to understand what web accessibility is before we do anything else.
In other words, accessibility is the ability of everyone to have access to something.
Web accessibility is a way to help people with disabilities access websites and web applications.
In other words, web accessibility is making sure that people with disabilities can use the internet.
Web accessibility refers to the degree to which a website is accessible to people with disabilities. With better accessibility, users who have disabilities can understand, navigate, and interact with the web in a way that is better than before.
We know how search engines work. Google uses robots, orwhat they call “spiders,” which are programs that crawl websites and analyze them based on over 200 ranking factors to determine where they should rank in search results.
Also, assistive technology uses signals in the code to identify the context of what is being crawled.
There isn’t much work that needs to be done to ensure that your website is accessible by assistive technology devices. The majority of what is required to rank well in SEO can be achieved by focusing on key ranking factors like page titles, headings, anchor text, and ALT text.
Most of the work around making a website or an app accessible is ensuring that different types of assistive technology can easily navigate your platform.
It is important for everyone to have access to places, regardless of whether or not they have a disability.
Here’s how:
- It helps people accessing the web through a slow internet connection or via a smaller screen such as mobile phones, smartwatches, smart TVs, and so on.
- It helps older people whose abilities get worse over time.
- It helps people with temporary disabilities, such as lost glasses or a broken arm.
5 Types of Web Accessibility Impairments
Disabilities are not just limited to sight or hearing. There are different types of disability or impairment.
1. Visual
There are varying degrees of visual impairment, from mild to severe.
These include:
- Color blindness – arises from the difficulty of distinguishing between colors such as red and green, yellow and blue, and in some cases, the inability to perceive any color.
- Low vision – which includes blurry vision, the ability to see either the center of the visual field or only the edges of the visual field
- Blindness – having a substantial to complete loss of vision in both eyes.
2. Auditory
These include mild to moderate hearing impairment. Losing even a small part of your audio content can be a problem.
These include:
- Hard of hearing – moderate hearing impairment
- Deafness – substantial and uncorrectable hearing impairment in both ears.
3. Physical
Physical disabilities are caused by problems with the muscles, including paralysis, poor coordination, and limited sensation. Joint problems, such as arthritis, and missing limbs can also cause physical disabilities.
These include:
- Arthritis – damage to the joints
- Amputation – missing limbs, or other parts of the body
- Paralysis – Loss of control over parts of the body.
4. Speech
This text is about the inability to produce speech that is recognizable by other people or software.
This includes:
- Muteness – the inability to speak caused due to mental disorders and cognitive impairments
- Dysarthria – paralysis of the muscles, including lips, throat, tongue required to speak.
5. Cognitive, Learning, and Neurological
These disabilities make it difficult for people to understand and process information.
These include:
- Autism – impairments of social communication
- Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) – involves difficulty in focusing on a single task or being easily distracted.
- Mental health disabilities – conditions such as anxiety, mood disorders that may cause difficulty in focusing and processing information
- Memory impairments – implies short-term memory or limited ability to recall language.
The 4 Principles of Accessibility
The POUR principles are the four guidelines used to create accessible digital content according to the WCAG. These principles are that the content should be Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust. Most people agree that if any of the rules are broken, the information will not be available, especially to those with disabilities.
Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) developed web accessibility.
Let’s take a closer look at the four accessibility principles:
- Perceivable: The content has to be presented so that users can access it with any one of their senses.
- Operable: A user should control all parts of the content through whatever means they choose to use, such as keyboard, mouse, trackpad, and other assistive technologies (AT).
- Understandable: The content format needs to make sense to the user. This includes language, instructions, how to use, and so on.
- Robust: Various devices and technology can access the content if the application is robust. When it comes to accessibility, robust applications work well with various assistive technologies.
What are the areas of overlap between SEO and accessibility? How can we make a positive impact through our work?
1. Page Titles
Page titles are important for two reasons: they provide context to help users understand what the page is about, and they appear as the main headline in search results.
Titles are important not only because they let users know whether the information on a page is relevant to them, but also because they help to differentiate content when multiple tabs or pages are open. Screen readers will use page titles to explain to users when they are navigating between pages.
Instead of optimizing page titles for bots, SEO best practice is to optimize them for users. This also makes the pages more accessible.
2. Headings
The most important factor for headings in SEO is the H1 tag, which gives the reader an overview of the main content on the page. The H2-H6 tags are used to further define the structure of the page.
Assistive technologies use headings in the same way that search engine crawlers do, to quickly navigate a page and move to a particular section of the content.
When creating heading tags for accessibility, it is important to: – only use one H1 – make sure all headings are relevant to the content beneath them – only use headings if there is content below them
3. Sitemaps
Sitemaps that are easy to find on a website are helpful for all users to locate the content they need, especially if the site has a complex navigation system.
They provide an overview and clear access to all the important pages on the site.
Sitemaps are also helpful for SEO because they help search engine crawlers find links to other pages on the site. This is especially useful if the pages are not linked to anywhere else on the site.
4. Anchor Text
Anchor text is the words used to describe the content found on the linked page. The title of a webpage can be used to give the reader an idea of what the page is about, and whether or not clicking on the link to the page would be of interest to them.
Screen readers usually go through a page by pressing the tab key, which moves the focus to each link on the page. The screen reader announces when it finds a link, and then reads the anchor text.
If the users think the link will be useful, they will hit enter to follow it.
They do this by looking at the words used in the link to the page.
The sentence that the link is contained in is also helpful for both SEO and accessibility purposes.
When creating anchor text, be sure that the text is relevant to the page being linked to, and that it is a concise message.
5. Breadcrumb Links
Breadcrumbs are a type of secondary navigation that allows users to go back to their original page or top-level content. They also show the path that the user took to get to the current page.
Breadcrumb links help search engine crawlers understand the structure of a site and show screen readers how to navigate it.
In addition to being an effective SEO strategy, internal linking can also help improve the navigation on large websites with a lot of pages.
There are a few things you can do to make sure breadcrumbs are accessible for all users. For example, keep them in the same spot on every page of your website.
It is important that breadcrumb links are descriptive so that screen readers can understand them.
6. Alt Text
The most well-known intersecting point between SEO and accessibility is the image alt text, which is used to provide a text alternative for users who are visually impaired.
Rather than stuffing keywords into the alt text in an attempt to Signal to search engines that the site is relevant, the alt text needs to be accurate and relevant so that it can be read aloud by screen readers.
The alternate text for an image is used to help search engine crawlers understand the content of the image, which is especially important for image search.
Machine learning algorithms have improved a lot in recent years, so search engines can now tell if someone is stuffing keywords into their alt text.
As well, computer vision is continuously improving and is now able to recognize what is present in a photograph, to automatically generate appropriate alt text.
7. Navigation
A website’s navigation bar is designed to help users quickly find the information they need, as well as to display the most important pages on the site. This text is saying that having a sitemap is useful for both users and search engine crawlers. A sitemap is a page on a website that lists all of the other pages on the site, making it easy for users to find what they’re looking for, and easy for search engines to index the entire site.
Typically, navigation links are designed to be accessible by keyboard and screen reader, meaning they can be read by anyone.
Only including primary pages will ensure your navigation is accessible.
When you have a website with a flat architecture, it can be confusing for users and also shows search engine crawlers that your site is flat.
8. Readability
The readability of the content on a website is important for both users and search engines.
One way to help users with cognitive disabilities is to keep the reading level of your content simple.
This will also help users who are not reading in their first language and those who may be distracted.
To make a website easier to read, use simple language, left-align the text, and use lists.
It is important that URLs are easy to read and understand for accessibility reasons, and it is considered best practice to use word separators such as dashes.
The purpose of a URL is to let users know what they can expect to find on a page, as well as to provide search engines with context about the page.
9. User Interactions
Although Googlebot is able to crawl websites and analyse their content, it is unable to perform physical interactions such as clicking buttons or opening accordions. Similarly, screen readers can only carry out these actions if they are specifically instructed to do so by the user.
Reducing the number of physical interactions is recommended.
Make sure that text is still contained within the source code for drop-down or accordion features on your site. This will ensure that both bots and screen readers are able to read the content without needing to perform any user interactions.
However, this hidden text must make sense and reflect what is written on the page, rather than using old school, hidden keyword stuffing methods.
Hover actions should generally be avoided, as they can result in content being revealed that is not included within the source code.
Summary
To ensure that everyone has a good experience on your website, including those with disabilities, make sure it is accessible. This will allow easy access to your site’s information.
Although it may seem daunting, following web accessibility best practices is relatively simple. This means that if you want your website to be accessible to as many people as possible, you should focus on optimizing it for SEO.
The following free tools and extensions can be used to test if your site is accessible.
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