5 Tips on How to Make Your WordPress Website Accessible

These days, enhancing the user experience is at the forefront in terms of web development priorities for online companies. Taking this one step further, companies that are forward thinking and have a social conscience are designing their WordPress websites with everyone’s needs in mind, including persons with disabilities.

If your online site is not yet currently optimized to meet the needs of online users with disabilities, you can easily make some changes in order to make your site accessible, without spending copious amounts of time and money.

Here are 5 tips on how to easily make your WordPress website more accessible:

1. Keep Your Site Layout Consistent

Keeping things consistent in terms of your navigation pane, header and sidebars is a great help in terms of usability, particularly for users with visual, cognitive and physical challenges. Fortunately, WordPress website themes come equipped with consistent layout and structure.

2. Use Headings Appropriately

Persons with vision issues who utilize screen readers in order to read text off the screen are able to read with relative ease if website pages include headers with only one h1 tag per page and headers are used appropriately to describe subsections.

3. Have Good Forms Structure

When creating forms on your WordPress website, make sure forms are designed with sufficient labeling outside form fields.

4. Use Image Alt Tags

Adding alt tags to posted images on your site will enable those using screen readers the ability to “see” your images as the assistive device will be able to read back what the image is and, as a side bonus for your WordPress website, alt tags will enhance your SEO.

5. Keyboard Enabled Links

For some online users with mobility limitations, accessing website links is performed by using a keyboard instead of a mouse. Something to consider excluding on your WordPress website would be MouseOver and MouseOut JavaScript handlers, as this is a barrier for ease of access with a keyboard.

With so much of the population nowadays using online access for the purposes of obtaining information and purchasing goods/services, enhancing the user experience is a critical element for e-commerce businesses to consider.

Persons with disabilities are a significant part of today’s global website visitor base and with today’s aging population we can safely assume that the percentage of online users with disabilities will in fact only continue to grow.

Making your WordPress website accessible for all enhances user experience, broadens your targeted audience, enhances profits and lets the virtual world know that you are an online company that believes in doing the right thing.