Creating web pages for the people with disabilities

17 December 2020

In the current modern world, technology is making the world more and inclusive and accessible to even more people than it was before a decade ago. We should do the same with our websites too. It should be accessible to everyone.

A lot of people with disabilities miss out on things because the website or the app is not designed to help them out.

The design of a website that is disability-friendly is actually quite simple.

Using alt attributes

This may sound very simple and basic but it is actually quite helpful. People with visual disabilities use screen reader software which reads the content on the page out loud.

The screen reader would let the user know the description of the image element present on the page reading the alt text out loud. We must make sure that we add proper and correct alt text for the images.

Appropriate clickable range

We must make sure that the elements on the page that are clickable must not have a small clickable range. A small clickable range can be troublesome for people with mobility issues. The clickable elements should be wide enough to be easily accessible to the users.

Smart color choices

The choices of colors used on the web page must be appropriate and the content must be easily visible. Poor color choices can make the content on the page incomprehensible and could be difficult to understand for people with color blindness.

Black text with a white background is standard practice and makes the text readable.

Text content

The text content on the page needs to be simple and easy to understand. If there is a lot of text on the page, we must break it into smaller paragraphs.

Keeping the text content simple is very helpful to people with learning disabilities

Descriptive links

If we need to embed any links on the page, we must make sure that we describe the link appropriately. For example, ”Know more about cloud computing” may be a more sensible choice than “To know more about cloud technology, click here”. This would help the people using screen readers understand the motive of the link used on the page.

We must make sure that the link is underlined whenever possible and must be distinguishable from the normal text. This would make sure that people with color blindness can identify the links without any trouble.

Use of tables only for displaying data

The usage of table elements on the page can be very useful for displaying the tabular information and should be used for that particular purpose only.

Using tables for lists, layout or anything else may confuse the screen readers used by people with visual impairments.

Website/webpage should be keyboard friendly

The site or page that we create should be easily navigable using the keyboard. The impairment assistive technologies depend on keyboard navigation.

One such example is using the Tab key for accessing the links, button, and form. We must design the site or page in such a way that the user can access the important elements of the page using the tab key.

Test the webpage/website properly

The webpage or website should be tested properly using real-world scenarios so that there are no accessibility issues for people with any sort of disabilities.