One topic in UX that I haven’t addressed is how to improve user experience for those with disabilities. Rather than try to cover all that’s been said on this topic, I narrowed it down to 10 web accessibility tips:
- Make sure all of your images have alt tags. Then think about how a screen reader will read the alt text and avoid repetition. The alt text “down arrow” on an anchor link is much better than the alt text “image of a down arrow that links further down this Web page.” Not only is the latter option too wordy but it also repeats information that the screen reader already provides. In the first example, the screen reader would read the alt text “down arrow” as “Image: down arrow. Internal link.”
- For those with auditory disabilities, provide captions or transcripts for all videos
- Don’t make the text on your site too small. Take into account that there will be a wide range of ages interacting with your website and some users will have poor eyesight. Also, keep in mind that people may be accessing your website on a range of devices and what is readable on a large monitor may look completely illegible on a notebook/laptop/mobile device.
- This is more difficult but try not to make your site entirely dependent on colors. If the only way to tell the difference between a link and normal text in a paragraph, is by color, this will be very difficult for someone with color blindness.
- Try to use highly contrasting colors for your text and background. This will especially benefit those with poor eyesight, but all of your users will appreciate being able to read with less effort.
- Make sure that each section has an appropriate header, so that blind users with screen readers can skip ahead, if they wish, to the section they are interested in.
- Provide an alternative to scrolling. For people with physical disabilities, scrolling can be problematic. Anchor links allow keyboard-only users to skip to relevant sections of the page.
- Don’t use tables for the page layout, as they add much more content for screen reader users to wade through. For example, a screen reader will tell a user that a page has a table with "x" number of columns and rows. Instead, use CSS for styling and presentation of the website. Only use tables when you are displaying data.
- For those with cerebral palsy or those who are only able to type very slowly, make sure that the user doesn’t have to fill out an entire form again, if they make a mistake on one field in the form. This is already frustrating for someone without a disability but for those with cognitive impairment, filling out forms can be a very negative experience.
- Finally, involve people with disabilities in the design process, to get accurate feedback. Get them to show you some examples of websites that work well for them and those that do not. Use this feedback to design websites that are inclusive of people with disabilities.
There are many reasons to make your website accessible to those with disabilities. Not only are you allowing disabled users to interact with the Web, but accessible design makes web content available to more browsers (e.g. cell phones, hand-held devices), and to users with temporary injuries or those working in problematical environments (e.g. dim or strong light, heavy noise, etc.) For more information, here is a link to further Web Accessibility Evaluation Resources.