Principles Associated With Digital Accessibility Designed For The Modern Marketers Out There

By Evans Walsh On Jul 28, 2019

Right now, web designers and the developers have the power in their hands to help the differently disabled users to navigate through websites by using the CSS for controlling visual page elements. There are multiple ways available, used for crafting some of the best accessible websites and making them all the more helpful for disabled people to browse and enjoy.

The main intention of digital accessibility is to create pages, making it super accessible by as many people as possible. Designing for such pages will cover up so many sages. It means designing for individuals with cognitive or sensory impairments. It is also mean designing for those unfortunate people suffering from any kind of physical limitation. Those people, who otherwise rely on assistive and adaptive technologies like magnifiers or screen readers, can easily get help in viewing digital content with digitalized accessibility.

There are some of the major accessibility principles available, which will help you to create the best Digital Marketing materials of all time. There are separate principles allotted for developers and separate ones for designers in this regard. You can log online at https://siteimprove.com to learn more about those principles and straight from the core for better understanding in this regard.

Try to enable keyword-based navigation purposes:

It is mandatory to make all the websites keyword accessible as not all consumers can use a mouse or just view screen like others. As per some of the recent surveys made, around 60.4% of the survey respondents will often or always use a keyword for the web age navigation purposes. On the other hand, the individuals with temporary or permanent loss of their hands or even the fine muscle control might use a keyword or even modified keyboards for covering navigation purposes.

To make this keyword navigation work just fine, a user might be just able to navigate through page by just moving from focused items to other items.
A user will follow the visual flow mainly, starting from left to right and then from top to bottom. They will start from headers to that of the main navigation, and then from page navigation to the footer lastly.
While using keyboards for navigation purposes, the enter button will activate one focused link. Then you have the space bar tab, which will activate a focused form element.
Other than that, you have the “tab’ to facilitate navigation between the elements, and finally the escape button to allow users to close any element.
Keeping this point in mind, it is always mandatory to consider actions that users might intend to. The main thumb rule over here is that if you can interact with the focusable element using a mouse, ensure that you can interact using the keyboard. Some of these elements will include the buttons, links, calendar date picker and form fields.
You have to be sure that the users can easily navigate through the keywords using all the interactive components of the website. Then you have to list down the focusable elements of the website to create easy usable focus indicators.
You have to allow the users to just bypass the navigation windows in case there are multiple links under the drop-down menu.
Then you have to structure the underlying source-based code for ordering the content and navigation properly. Then you can always use the CSS for controlling the visual aspect of the present elements.

Application of standard HTML semantics for developers:

The accessible design will always start with a standard version of HTML semantic. It enables the screen readers to add on some elements on the page so that users will come to know ways to interact with contents. Whenever these tags under HTML are used without semantical information for visual styling, the browser will just display the elements as intended by the developers which might not prove to be quite useful for all kinds of users, especially the disabled ones.

Always remember that the user’s experience with that of the screen reader can easily vary in a great manner.
For example, using the custom coding for overriding the default based browser styles will always help in producing something, which might resemble a header.
On the other hand, the screen reader might not be able to announce or understand that the element over here is a header.
Therefore, it is always vital for the developers to first use the HTML of the standard version whenever it is made possible so that the readers will maintain content and structure while reading aloud.
You are always asked to use the structural elements to group elements and also creating separate regions on the page like navigation, header, footer and main.
Screen readers can often recognize that these structural elements through the design and get to announce them later to the users and just helping them to allow some of the added navigations through elements.

Time to use the attributes:

Whenever the matter involves linking descriptions and texts for URLs, the screen readers will generally skip from one link to another within any article or blog. If there are some of the vague links available namely “read more” or just ‘click here” then it provides quite a little context or meaning for anyone to interpret that on the screen reader.

You always have to be descriptive and specific with the link text and add meaningful phrases to describe the content that the link is well connected to.
For example, in place of the term ‘contact us,’ you can try using some of the more specified languages like “contact the Sales team from our side.”
For all the images and videos out there, you can always assign the ALT attributes and use the names of the descriptive files.
It is always the duty of the website developers to banish the use of non-descriptive and extraneous words in links and optimize the URL and file names and use open and closed captioning for video-based content.

Following these steps will rather make the webpage easily digitally accessible for everyone, even the disabled personnel, as well.