Considering Web Accessibility during Web Development

One of the most important, but overlooked aspects of web development is web accessibility. Web accessibility is quite simply, the process of making a website accessible by all types of people, disabled or otherwise. Web accessibility has become far more important recently, due to the ever increasing presence of the Internet in everyone’s lives. This increase of reliance on the Internet means that life has become more difficult for people who are blind or have poor eyesight, just think about how many companies require you to use their website for basic tasks these days, and it’ll only become more prevalent in the future.

Fortunately, as previously discussed if W3C standards are followed by web developers, the process of ensuring your website is easily accessible to the disabled is relatively easy. Writing good HTML code means that people who cannot see, can use text to speech or text to braille devices to help them navigate your web pages.

Although compensating for visually impaired users during web development is a good start to ensuring web accessibility, it is not enough; there are many users who have trouble with motor skills, specifically in their hands. A web developer needs to ensure that their website can be navigated easily by those without fine motor control, this could be solved through a variety of methods but the most prominent would be having basic and/or large navigation bars or links and enabling the site to being accessible with a switch device.

The content of the site should also be accessible by people, who are deaf or hearing impaired, this means a web developer would try to make videos with subtitles or closed captions. There are a variety of easy ways of making your website more accessible to people with disabilities, and in the end it means that more people will be able to view the site properly. Not only this, but in some countries there is now a legal incentive to actually allow force web developers to provide for disabled people and now finally web accessibility is becoming an essential part of web development.