Optimize the Accessibility of Your Small Business Website

Making sure your small business website is accessible to all users provides direct benefits in expanding your audience, as well as indirect benefits in improving your search engine results.

Companies with websites that are accessible to all users, regardless of potential disabilities, expand the number of people reached while also providing better SEO, faster load times, and increasing the site’s compatibility with mobile devices.

Ensuring accessibility can also provide legal and compliance benefits for small businesses. Companies and organizations in regulated industries, such as healthcare, financial services and education, are required to offer accessible sites. Companies in other industries, although not mandated, could face potential claims under the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) if their site is not accessible.

Potential requirements aside, though, the potential benefits in expanding your website’s ability to serve all users far outweigh the time and effort of designing a site that complies with web accessibility guidelines.

Understanding Accessibility

In basic terms, web accessibility means making sure your website and digital content can be navigated, interacted with, and consumed by users regardless of any limitations they may have.

Under Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), an accessible site meets the following principles:

• Perceivable - Visitors can understand the site’s content and information.
• Operable - Users can use all of the site’s functionality, such as navigating pages, selecting links, and playing any audio or video files
• Understandable - The site’s text and graphic design must be easy to understand
• Robust - The content must be accessible to all users, including those who use assistive technology.

Some ways to improve the accessibility of your small business website include using clear language that allows people of different reading abilities to understand your intent. This includes putting the important details of your messaging first, avoiding complex phrases and words, and either avoiding or explaining any technical terms.

It’s also a good idea to break your text into short sections with headlines that signal the section’s content to readers. This allows site visitors to scan your content and find the most relevant information quickly and easily.

As a related bonus, short sections with headlines make it easier for a site visitor using a screen reader to find the information they’re looking for easily.

Similarly, it’s important to make sure the text and background colors are easily distinguished, and that people with color blindness will be able to read your text and headlines.

As you are setting up links, avoid generic "click here" descriptions that don’t indicate where the link is directing a user. It’s more effective to say something like "click here to see tonight’s specials."

Identifying Media Files

One of the most important elements you can add to make a website accessible is descriptive text that describes the media files on your site. For photographs, be sure to include captions and alternative text that displays when someone hovers a mouse over an image, or accesses your site with a screen reader.

For audio and video files, it’s beneficial to include text captions of the content so someone with a hearing disability can understand what’s happening in those files. Closed captioning provides similar benefits for videos.

A variety of accessibility testing tools can provide helpful guidance in identifying potential issues as well as suggestions for making your small business website as accessible as possible.