Is Your Website Friendly Enough for the Differently- Abled?

True. Most of the people are online and enjoy surfing the internet to while away time. But most website designers overlook the need to accommodate the interest of people who are differently-abled. According to a UN report, about 1 billion people across the world live with a disability. That’s a huge number indeed! Thus, it becomes imperative that you cater to the needs of people with special needs and incorporate functions in your website to attract them too. If you are still wondering what you can do to improve your website, you must seek help from a professional website development company and get your website cracking! There are several ways to make sure that you create a disable friendly website. Here are a few, simple tips that you can implement.

  1. Understand Your Audience First and foremost, you need to understand your audience. It may not be practical to design for all disabilities. If you really desire to make your website the most accessible then you will have to get a first- hand experience about how a disabled person goes online. Once you have learnt about how assistive technology works, you can go ahead with designing a disability friendly website. 

  2. Use Alt Tags The words that appear on an image when you hover the mouse over it are called as ‘alt tags’. A visually impaired person may use a screen reader to read out the text on the image out loud. That is the only way for such a person to know what the image is about. Make use of this opportunity and describe the image accurately. For instance, if the image is of pile of bricks, you may use alt text as ‘pile of bricks’. 

  3. Include Periods in Abbreviations Certain words in HTML may require periods in between each letter. For instance, if you are referring to Central Intelligence Agency, it should be written as C.I.A instead of CIA. A screen reader ( a software program that reads a text on a website out loud) does not recognize an abbreviation without any periods and will read it out phonetically as ‘cia’. 

  4. Give a Description to Your Link It will be beneficial if you describe a link embedded in your post rather than just asking the user to click on it. For example, it is better to write, ‘ To know more about the dental treatment, check out ‘ NAME OF THE CHANNEL’ instead of ‘ To learn more about the dental treatment, click here’. Ask your website development company to underline all your links and use a colour contrast to differentiate between a hypertext and regular text. This will help a colour-blind person to identify a link immediately. 

  5. Use Subtitles and Transcripts In case your website has regular video updates, try and include subtitles for your videos. YouTube provides users with tools that allow them to include subtitles to their videos. A transcription of the video on your website will also be incredibly helpful to many users. Read the full article on : http://www.satejinfotech.in/