The importance of business website accessibility

Your business website’s accessibility is a very important factor that should be taken into account within its overall design; it’s important that you work to ensure that your company website caters to any and all customers and does not work to limit access to those with an impairment or disability.

Within the below article, In Front Digital will discuss the ways in which your company can work to make your website’s landing page design more accessible to your site’s visitors, helping to optimise the overall design of your business website.

Proper Keyboard Navigation

Customers with visual impairments or limited fields of vision may utilise various tools, such as braille keyboards and smartphone voiceover features, that work to aid website accessibility and assist with reading the information available on a webpage, as well as navigating around the site. The design of your company website should be developed with this information in mind, ensuring easy navigation between all elements of your site, including:

  • Widgets
  • Photographs & infographics
  • Drop-down menus
  • Contact forms
  • Anchor text

Font Accessibility

It may be a challenge for any site visitors with impaired vision to read any smaller font present on your webpage, meaning they could struggle to gain all of the necessary information that they require from your site, such as details about the products and services that your company offers, the product descriptions, as well as how to get in touch with your business or complete a transaction.

Those with limited fields of vision are able to make use of accessibility settings within their website browser that help them to make changes to certain design elements when viewing your website, such as the font size. This feature allows better accessibility to those with impaired vision; however, this could break the layout of your site if your business website is not developed with these tools in mind. It is highly important that your website developers allow for the font size on your site to be changed without this compromising page layout, ensuring your site is fully adaptable and can cater to visitor needs effectively.

Alt Tags

Alt tags are an assistive feature found within website design that allow for descriptive captions to be added to images, ensuring any information that an image or infographic may offer is easily accessed by all customers, regardless of any visual impairment.

The imagery that you utilise on your website can often prove to be one of the largest accessibility barriers to potential customers with visual impairments, meaning photographs that are used to enhance the information displayed on your business website could be lost completely if not correctly incorporated in to your web design.

In order to allow all of your customers to grasp the full extent of your site landing pages, alt tags should be added to any and all of the images that are used across your site.
You should work to ensure that alt tags are included sitewide, guaranteeing that your company website is as accessible as possible.

There are many factors that should be considered when determining the landing page design for your business website, but making sure that your site design is accessible to users is a highly important task, ensuring that the customer experience is not limited by a lack of accessibility. It is vital that all of your site visitors are able to interact with you and your business in the same way, so accessibility features should not be overlooked.