No matter how great a brand is, it doesn’t do any good if a quarter of the population can’t use its website. According to the CDC, 25% of adults in the United States have some form of disability. A good percentage of disabilities are those with hearing and sight impairments. When it comes to using a website, products or service descriptions, online videos, purchasing, and navigation, should optimize your content for accessibility. And because niche markets have specialized interests, the markets sizes will be smaller that larger segments of the population. That means for a niche business, every sale counts. So, optimize your website to include those with hearing or sight impairments, or you will lose out on online purchase opportunities from those potential customers.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is the standard for full and compliant website accessibility. There’s a rather long list of requirements. While full WCAG compliance takes some time, there are easy adjustments you can make now. It’s also helpful to use an accessibility checker. There are free ones, and websites like accessiBe provide accessibility checking, and Microsoft 365 accessibility checker. So what can you do to make your niche website more accessible? Read on.
Ways to Make Your Website More Accessable
Here are some things to check to make sure your website is accessible.
Color
Visually impaired people need high contrast between text color and background color in order to read your text. High contrast is especially important for retinitis pigmentosa, glaucoma, and diabetic retinopathy and cataract.
Alt Text
Seeing images is difficult and sometimes visually people with visual impairments can’t see them at all. They depend on alt text to tell them what the image is about. Alt text is written copy that’s read aloud by a screen reader. It’s also indexed by search engines and appears when an image fails to load. Alt text does not appear on a screen. Instead it is contained in the HTML code. Most design templates do the coding for you all you have to do is write the words.
Descriptive URLS
For visually impaired people, descriptive URLs give context of a URL, and make it easier to skip to the right content. For example, a meaningful description that gives some context for a URL is the “About” page. Instead of www.abccompany.com/about, it’s better to use a URL such as www.abccompany.com/about-our-company.
Structured Headings
Visually impaired people use screen readers. When they open a page, they use a screen reader to understand the nature of content. That’s why it’s important to Structure your headings so that your main heading (H1) identifies the topic with subheadings to group topical information into a logical order. Think of structured headings like an outline for writing a paper.
Adjustable Font Size
Those with low vision often need to resize text to read it. Thankfully the ability to enlarge text is done in a browser’s setting. However, every now a website may truncate or overlap the text when a user enlarges text. Website that are built with predesigned theme templates are usually coded to prevent that problem. Make sure you go on your website and view it at various font sizes to make sure the text is resizing properly. WordPress Mobile-Friendly Themes are quite good ad building websites that not only can adjust text/, bur also responsive text.
Captions
There are two kinds of captions. There are called open and closed captions. Open captioning appears at the bottom or top of a video with words that are the same as the audio. Open caption is always on and can’t be turned off. Closed captioning can be turned on or off by the viewer. Video captioning is highly important for people with hearing impairments. Your website videos will be of little use if they can’t hear audio. On a side note, over 50% of viewers with unimpaired hearing watch videos with the sound off and use captions instead. Rev is a good for creating open and closed captioning.
Keyboard Navigation
Visual and physical disabilities make using a mouse difficult if not impossible., and they need a to a keyboard to use the internet. In addition to those with disabilities, there are many people conditions like arthritis, hand tremors, and carpel tunnel syndrome. To provide keyword navigation requires html coding. Unless you know how to code, you’ll have to find a website designer to do it for you.
Make Optimizing for Accessibility a Priority
Just because someone with a disability wouldn’t use your product or service, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make it accessible. People with hearing or sight impairments buy gifts for someone who doesn’t have an impairment. Gifts for birthdays anniversaries, Mother’s and Father’s Day batmitzfas, graduations, and wedding presents are all commonly purchased by people whose hearing or sight are impaired.
Optimizing your niche website for accessibility makes good niche business sense. Your sales will be higher if people in your niche market can use your website. It’s not hard to do and you will reap the purchase rewards for doing it.