The benefits – to you and your users – of providing a WCAG conforming website

Improved user experience

Accessibility can improve the user experience for certain types of users, for example people with impaired vision. You'll remove common barriers for these people and give wider access to your information and services. 

In many cases improving things for these users makes the user experience for ALL users more straightforward too. 

Legal compliance

In many countries a minimum level of accessibility is required by law, particularly within the public sector and for certain charities. For example, in England, Scotland and Wales you must comply with The Equality Act 2010. 

Inclusivity and diversity

Accessible websites promote equality and equity, enabling you to share information and services with the widest possible audience.

SEO benefits

Search engine algorithms such as Google can now recognise accessibility measures. The more accessible your website, the more favourably your content will score. With accessibility measures in place, you will benefit from a higher SEO ranking. 

Business reputation and expansion

Making your website accessible shows that your organisation is committed to inclusion and diversity. Showing you are willing to provide for all audiences can enhance your brand image, and help you to reach a wider audience. 

How to make your site more accessible

Alt tags

Provide alternative image tags to describe images. People who use screen readers to navigate the web will hear the description, providing useful context. Alt tags can also be used by search engines to understand your content, which can improve your page ranking.

Good colour contrast

Ensure accessible contrast between the foreground and background colours of your website. This ensures your content is clearly legible for all users, but especially for people with impaired vision.

You might also enable users to change the colours across your website to suit their preferences. Options such as high or low contrast, high or low saturation, or inverted colours can improve the experience for people with impaired vision or a Colour Vision Deficiency (colour blindness). 

Text resizing

Functionality that allows users to resize the text across your website can assist people with impaired vision.

Screen readers

Your website can be coded with screen readers in mind. Provide screen reader text where appropriate, to help people using assistive technologies.

Keyboard navigation

Users should be able to to navigate the website using only a keyboard, as not everyone can use a mouse.

Meaningful links

Links to other content should be clearly and descriptively worded, so the users understands what they'll be getting. For example ‘Explore our services’ is a much clearer than ‘click here’. Some people using screen readers navigate by links only, so this is particularly important for those users. 

Transcripts and captions

Include transcripts and captions (sometimes called subtitles) for video media to assist people with impaired hearing.

Accessible forms with meaningful validation

For any forms on your website, make sure it's possible to complete the form without using a mouse to navigate. 

If information is entered incorrectly on the form, provide meaningful feedback. For example ‘Your email address must contain the @ symbol, please try again’ is much more informative than ‘something went wrong’.

Responsive design

Your website should be coded using responsive design concepts. This ensures the site is optimised for all devices and screen sizes, from mobile phones through to wide desktops. 

A 'mobile first' approach to website design is the concept of providing the ultimate experience for mobile users. You then add more features and functionality for desktop users through the process of ‘progressive enhancement’. This is used in preference to the concept of ‘graceful degradation’, where features are removed from the desktop version of a site to get it to ‘fit’ on a mobile device. 

Progressive enhancement ensures that desktop is an enhanced version of the mobile site, rather than mobile being a restricted version of desktop. This is more suited to the way people use the internet now, with majority of web traffic being mobile-driven – often accessed via social media platforms and by users on the go.

ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) roles

Where possible, the correct semantic HTML elements should be used with appropriate ARIA tags to help with assisted technologies being used by those with disabilities, such as screen readers. This ensures that these technologies interact with the object in a way that is expected, such as scrolling through a slider, or tabbing through a menu.

Semantic HTML

It is important that the website is correctly using valid HTML markup, such as using ordered headings, lists, paragraphs etc.

How to test your website's accessibility

There are various ways you can test your website to see how it performs, and find suggested ways to improve. Google's in-built browser tool, Lighthouse, provides a score for Performance, SEO, accessibility and general standards. WAVE is another well-known, detailed accessibility test tool.