Top 5 tips to improve accessibility of your charity website
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Creating an easily accessible website for your charity is a key step toward increasing inclusivity and making sure your charity is as welcoming to as many visitors as possible regardless of their abilities or needs.
Here are five steps you can take today to make sure your website can accommodate more users and help everyone feel at home when they visit your charity online.
1. Add more descriptions
Websites are full of images that add context and flavour to the charity content you publish on your website, but it’s important to consider how users who rely on screen readers might interpret this.
To make images more understandable for these users, consider adding detailed descriptive alternative text (alt text) to all imagery. By providing visitors to your site with meaningful descriptions, you make your website more accessible to visually impaired users. Plus, adding more text in this way makes your charity website easier to navigate and more likely to appear in search, improving the experience for all visitors.
2. Choose colour carefully
Colour choice and colour contrast both play an important role in making your charity website readable for as many people as possible. It is important to consider a palette that accommodates users who may be colour blind or autistic, as certain combinations make text easier to read and less contrasting colours can make the website easier to view.
Check the contrast between different colour combinations against WCAG standards; https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/.
3. Font choice matters
Another stylistic choice to consider when making your charity website accessible is the font that you use. For instance, sans serif fonts (such as Arial or Helvetica – the geometric fonts without the tails) have been proven to be easier to read for dyslexic users. Clean and simple fonts make content easier to digest for everyone, but sans serif fonts have also been shown to be more accessible for those with ADHD.
4. Video accessibility & subtitles
If your charity website has multimedia content, such as videos and audio content, these can also be made more inclusive as well.
By providing captions for videos or full transcriptions of audio files you can ensure deaf users that those who are hard of hearing can fully engage with your charity’s content and enjoy the site to its fullest.
The extra benefit is that by making your site accessible you get extra ‘brownie points’ from Google too!
5. Testing – one, two, three, four, five…
Finally, one of the best ways to make sure your charity website is as accessible and inclusive as possible is to test, test, and test again. Regular website testing with users who have disabilities makes sure your website continues to be designed around their unique needs and is a great way to showcase your charity’s commitment to the continuous improvement of, innovation in user accommodation, and the prioritisation of inclusivity.
If you’re interested in applying any of these changes or want to talk more about how to make your charity website as accessible as possible, give us a call today.