Making a website is never easy. You might find it difficult to find the theme you’re looking for or maybe it’s just tough filtering out content on a daily basis. There are always going to be updates needed, too. If you plan on having a website that remains relevant, then you also need to make sure it’s accessible to both the majority and the minority. One part of that is making it as user-friendly as possible.
Disabilities to keep in mind:
- Color-Blindness — Contrary to popular belief, most people that are color blind are only partially color blind. They might not see greens or red properly, but there are also people that only see grayscales which means that colors that are extremely similar or of a same light/dark spectrum are almost impossible to distinguish.
- Blindness/Motor Skills — Unsurprisingly, a blind person or a person with movement issues is not going to be using their mouse for the most part, they’ll use the keyboard. That means that having twenty different menus all with their own submenus is a bad idea.
- Deafness — If you’ve got a captcha which uses sound or even an intro video without subtitles, that needs to be changed. Some computers and apps can make subtitles for most things but not everyone uses them.
- Difficulty Seeing — While this isn’t necessarily a disability, there are plenty of older people or even young people with vision problems that simply can’t read you 8pt text. Try to keep it at least moderate (12-14) or make a large-text version.
Changes that can be made:
Make your website keyboard-friendly! Try changing things and accessing your website with keyboard-only navigation. Reduce the amount of links, menus, and features on pages if you’re able to.
Be picky about your colors. Don’t just settle for red and black or blue and green. Make sure that your color scheme can work for everyone.
In other words, make sure you posts look like this.
And not this.
Use headers carefully on your website. Formulate what you want you various headers and sizes to look like and stick to it. If every header is huge, it can be hard to distinguish where articles end, what titles are, and in-page navigation becomes more difficult.
Use re-sizable text and make sure it works for your website. The important part to this is to make sure it doesn’t break your site. Format it in a way that big or small, anyone can read it.
Lastly, just keep your users in mind. This is important no matter what. If a user comes to you with a problem in the site thanks to a disability, listen. Adapt your website if you can so that everyone can use it!