Web Content Accessibility

The presentation below on how to incorporate practices to improve web-content accessibility was given at Bookbuilders of Boston’s workshop, Innovations in Editorial Workflows in October, 2014.

TL;DR

Some of the people who visit your website might be using assistive technology or might need other accommodations. Beyond having your website designed with accessibility in mind, some simple things that can help people navigate your website content are:

  • Providing alt text image descriptions for images
  • Formatting any headers using H1, H2, etc instead of manually changing the typeface
  • Captioning and/or providing transcripts for audio and video content

These things don’t only make your website more accessible, they also allow browsers to recognize content and its hierarchy, thereby improving your SEO.

Presentation Slides

Resources Mentioned

The Web Accessibility Initiative

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 at a glance

WCAG checklist

Disability statistics

Plain language guidance

Designing for screen reader compatibility

SEO and accessibility overlap

How disabilities affect website use

Demo of ZoomText, JAWs and Dragon