Making your website as accessible as possible is of the utmost importance. Accessibility directly translates into usability. Improving this aspect of your website increases the range of people that can effortlessly use it. Whether your visitors browse it from different devices or they are visually impaired, making your website more accessible ensures consistent user experience.
How do you do it? How do you take the design and content you have and make it more convenient for your audience’s use?
Let’s see how you can leverage website design, RPA, chatbots, and captions to make your website more accessible.
Revisit Website Design
Your website design should follow a certain logic. Map the most logical road for an average website visitor and ensure that the visual order of elements in your website layout matches the logical order. To further enhance accessibility, using the “tab” should follow your roadmap.
To capture visually impaired leads, you have to use alternative text for images. These visitors use various tools, such as screen readers, that help them read the text and comfortably navigate a website. By doing so, you will also be doing a favor to mobile visitors who have “data saving” turned on on their devices.
While we are talking about alt text for images, you should also know that descriptive links do more justice for website accessibility than the “click here” ones. Make sure to describe where your links go to.
Did you know that 16% of your visitors are colorblind? These visitors will have trouble telling the difference between essential and less important elements of your website. To make the website more accessible to them, use a higher color contrast between background and text. This will also enhance text readability for all website visitors.
Make Sure Your Videos Have Captions
Videos are commonly used on websites. They are engaging and more comfortable to consume than text. Still, some visitors may not have access to audio, they can’t turn the volume up, or they can’t hear well enough.
If you use videos on your website, make sure to provide captions for all of them. Embedding videos from YouTube is really popular these days. Check if YouTube videos have captions before embedding them and make sure to turn them on properly in the YouTube embedding link.
Use Dynamic Content With Care
Overstuffing your website with dynamic content is one of the common nails on the accessibility coffin. Noone can navigate a website with ease when videos start to play automatically, overlays pop out when you least expect them, and lightboxes appear out of nowhere.
Don’t get us wrong. Dynamic content is okay as long as you make it friendly for screen readers. Stay on top of the best alert and message dialogs practices to improve the accessibility on websites with dynamic content. You should also turn off auto-play on videos and make sure that visitors can use a keyboard to control the media and other dynamic content elements (e.g., slideshow).
Use Chatbots To Enable RPA Transaction Processing
Smart use of cutting-edge technologies can significantly improve the accessibility of your website. One of the best examples is chatbot tech. Enabled by AI, natural language processing, these little website helpers can turn your site into true user experience oasis. Thanks to chatbot text-to-speech capabilities, your website will become even more convenient for impaired visitors.
The visitors of websites that are fronts for financial companies and medical institutions are worried about data privacy. Chatbots resolve security issues on the go. Since they operate based on Robotic Process Automation (RPA), they significantly reduce the margin of error and automatically encrypt all sensitive data, thus ensuring unpenetrable data privacy and security.
“Here at Snatchbot, we are happy to share that our chatbots have already found use in healthcare and finance verticals, allowing companies to provide reliable and secure services in real-time,” said Avi Ben Ezra, Chief Technology Officer of Snatchbot.
Embrace Mobile Friendliness
To ensure the ultimate accessibility of your website, you have to acknowledge that we live in the mobile era. Almost everyone has a smartphone today and uses it to consume online content, use online services, and have fun online.
Your website has to respond to all requirements set by mobile-friendly design. The most critical factor is website loading speed, which you can with Google’s official page speed tool. Right after page loading time, you have simple navigation and content layout and mobile-friendly forms. Check all these boxes, and you will make your website accessible for your mobile visitors.
We made sure that all these steps are easy-to-follow. Providing secure means for data sharing with RPA chatbots, making essential design elements friendly to screen readers, making your website mobile-friendly, and using dynamic content in an unobtrusive way will help you make your site more accessible. Keep tabs on new and emerging website accessibility trends to be able to make updates in time and deliver a consistent user experience.