When the team of a UX/UI design agency starts placing content on a website, it is essential to carefully consider user experience. The layouts that you choose should not cause any negative emotions and always be intuitively in the right places.Â
Accessibility of content is an indicator of its quality. This parameter determines how well the site is for people with different levels of computer knowledge. After all, a website that is accessible to different categories of users, including people with visual and hearing impairments, is better than others.
Investments in accessibility are more profitable today than ever. Accessibility can significantly affect the ranking of a site in search engines. Ultimately, the more people that can use the site, the better it is for the site’s owner.
In this post, you are going to discover six smart tips that will allow you to make the content of your website more accessible. Let’s dive in.
Find Clear and Specific Web Page Titles
The page title shows users exactly where they are while visiting the site. A good page title says what kind of page it is and briefly describes the topic of the content posted on it.
The top line of the browser should be as transparent as possible – a correctly composed heading can tell the user the essential information without forcing him to view more details. The visitor must be sure that they are in the right place.
Headings
When working with titles, it is vital that they are unique and correctly describe the content posted on the page. You can simplify your task by using a content management system. Today, many sites operate on CMS, which automatically creates page headers. It is enough to create a website or blog on WordPress, and a significant part of the problems with composing the headings will disappear.
In many cases, it makes sense to repeat the page title as the top page title. It also helps to create a summary table of all the headers and see if they all meet the accessibility criterion. Also, the page title should be in a site map – it is useful for SEO.
Divide content into small blocks with clearly defined headings and subheadings.
Sections
Any content posted on the page should be divided into brief and easy to digest segments. Each article should include an understandable heading that describes its part of the material. Wherever possible, you should use short paragraphs and lists, since this submission makes it easier for users to scan the page. The purpose of this approach is that any visitor to the site can quickly scroll the page, stopping only in those places that seem interesting to him.
You should reserve the most critical H1 heading for the page title. The remaining lines from H2 (relevant entry) to H6 (least significant) are best used sequentially. It is not necessary to use all six types of headings on one page, but skipping should be avoided for the sake of SEO.
Use Descriptive Text for Links and Buttons
Links are an essential part of any site. They allow users to navigate between pages, even without using navigation. The ability to view links and understand on the page with what type of content they are providing is a positive user experience. It is a crucial point that many people forget about. Correctly placed links increase the accessibility of web pages, and users smoothly navigate between web pages.
The text for links and buttons should accurately describe the content of the page. The selected text should be self-sufficient; it is better not to rely on a near-reference environment or other design elements. The reference text should be an explicit instruction for the user.
Correctly composed link text also affects website promotion. It sometimes happens that it’s enough to correct the errors and write the links correctly so that it immediately affects the ranking results.
The same goes for buttons and images if you use them as links. It would help if you wrote the alt tag so that when you hover over the cursor, a message appears precisely where the link leads to and what is discussing when going to the page.
Avoid Dependence on Touch Pointers
It is impossible to predict in advance precisely what difficulties users will encounter when visiting the site. Touch pointers, of course, in some way affect usability, but they do not work if, for example, the user cannot distinguish a particular color.
It is also useless to use sound touch pointers – deaf people don’t hear anything and leave the site without reaching their goal. It is necessary to exclude any possibility of an incorrect understanding of the pointer. Otherwise, some of the content will become inaccessible to some categories of users.
But you still cannot do without touch pointers. Users need to click on the buttons, fill out forms, and use the search on the site. All touch pointers should be contrasted concerning the background and other design elements, to increase the availability of content.
Take Care of Alternative Forms of Media Content
Any content on the site, except for text, should have an alternative option for those users who cannot access visual or audio elements. There are many different ways to solve this problem, but the determining factor here is the type of content and its environment.
- What can be an alternative for video if the user does not hear or is unable to use sound? Of course, captions!
- For images, a descriptive text is excellent.
- For audio content, if, for example, it is a podcast, it would be nice to attach a transcript.
Any of these methods significantly increase the availability of content.
Do Not Use Text as Images
To increase the availability of content, it is best never to use text in the form of images. Otherwise, if the user has a problem displaying pictures, he will not get access to the information he needs.
If you need to place text content on the site, you should do it exclusively using HTML. It ensures that the text will always be visible, even if browsers change it a bit externally. Also, the copy is much easier to edit than images. And of course, this is good for SEO.
Conclusion
The contents are the essential part of any website, and smart UX/UI decisions can affect the user experience more significantly than you can imagine. Hopefully, these tips will help you increase the accessibility of your website, and make the content available for a larger group of potential visitors.
