Did you hear about Accessibility? Are you a web developer, designer or maybe you have your own business? If so, this is something you have to know to increase your revenue and protect yourself against legal actions.

“Accessibility” is a term for best practices can be applied to electronic technologies, such as apps and websites, to make them accessible to everyone, including people with various disabilities. According to the statistics, 26% of American adults have some form of disability, and that is a lot of people that also want to use the internet, read e-books, buy stuff in e-commerce stores and learn new things. However, they can’t access the web with ease as we do – some people can’t see the image on their screen and have to listen to narrations that tell them what the website is all about, some only use keyboard since their fingers are not able to move the mouse with needed precision, and some can’t hear and rely only on written content. It’s our job to make sure that their web experience is much better, and they can access their favorite websites without having even more struggles caused by bad optimization.

What exactly makes disabled people struggle when accessing the web?
– There is no additional info for screenreader to narrate, resulting in narrations like “Block” and “Section”, instead of “Header” and “Article”
– Takes way too long to get to the main content, a user has to listen to every section that a header has before he is able to hear the main page content
– Keyboard controls are not supported for core website functionality, such as authorization, checkout, commenting, reviewing, etc.
– Audio content does not have any captions

What can we do about it?
– There is dozen of ARIA HTML attributes that are designed to modify the narrations to make them more informative
– Add invisible “Skip to main content” button at the top of the page, and make sure it’s the first element that is focused when pressing the “Tab” key
– Make sure to use proper HTML semantics, if the element is supposed to be pressed – use the tag, instead of

, or anything else
– Make captions for any audio, if it’s something unimportant – describe what’s going, if it’s crucial for understanding the content – add captions for whole audio track

Why should you do it?
– Improved Search Engine Optimization (SEO) due to better semantics and descriptions that allow web crawlers such as Googlebot to more accurately understand the contents of the page
– Higher userbase, potential conversion rates, and revenue
– A great way to revise the codebase and replace old and non-optimal solutions with more modern and robust ones
– It’s the right thing to do!

How should you start?
Visit https://a11yproject.com/ to find more information about applying these advice on practice the best way possible