These days everyone is online, which means that your website has to be accessible to anyone regardless of physical capability. But people with vision issues, hand tremors, or any number of other handicaps often have a hard time using websites that don’t take these limitations into account when they’re designed. That’s why it’s so important to adapt your website’s usability. But before you get worried about the kind of modifications that you’ll need to make to accommodate handicapped users, you need to keep in mind that these adaptations are actually web best practices anyways. This means that these changes will actually benefit all users! So let’s dig right in and discuss how you can make your website more handicapped-friendly.
Contact Information
Don’t bury your contact information in your footer or within an About Us page when you can easily display it in your header or navigation menu. Prominently feature your phone number in your header to make it easy for visitors to call. This enables people who have trouble clicking through to subsequent pages or reading small text a chance to see get in touch with you regardless of where they enter your site.
Pop-Out Menus
Clicking on a menu item and then subsequently clicking on an item that pops out is difficult for people with hand control issues or anyone who’s trying to browse while moving (like on public transportation). Eliminating pop-out menus is a best practice for mobile browsing anyways, so getting rid of your pop-outs can help your site with various audiences across multiple platforms. Keep your menus simple and intuitive to give users the best browsing experience.
Calls-to-Action
Using one clear call-to-action (CTA) is always important, but for people with sight issues it’s even more important because it’s harder for them to find what they’re looking for amongst clutter. Giving visitors a set path to follow to convert is also important when it comes to reducing bounce rate among less technologically savvy users. Having a CTA on your page surrounded by whitespace is a good way to draw more attention to it to entice people to move along the conversion funnel. Only use one CTA per page, and test the verbiage, color, placement, and size to achieve the best results.
Buttons
Increasing the size of your buttons helps them to stand out and it also makes them easier to click. Some website owners are afraid to increase the size of elements like buttons on their sites because they fear that it might ruin the aesthetic appeal of the site, but buttons can be resized and still fit within your existing design effectively. Additionally, the clickable area around buttons can also be increased without actually changing the look of the button at all.
Color Contrast
Text and background colors should have enough of a contrast that the text is easy to read. But don’t think that you need to have dramatic colors like black and white to have your text stand out. Within the color scheme of your design, you can find colors that stand out to make them easy to read. If there aren’t contrasting colors in your existing design portfolio, you can work with a professional designer to find something that will work better for your business.
Product Images
Just like buttons, your product images should be large enough for visitors to see your products clearly. You can either display these images as the default photos of your products or enable a zoom feature to allow visitors to enlarge their view if they need help seeing certain elements more clearly. You should already have multiple product images so just ensure that at least some of them are larger images for people that need them.
Stationary Images
Homepage slideshows are great because they let you display multiple images and look really professional, but slideshows that rotate too quickly are disorienting for people with vision handicaps. Slow down your slideshow or use stationary images to give people a little more time to focus in on the images. You’ll likely find that all visitors will pay more attention to the images that they’re seeing as a result.
Clickable Images
Clicking on text with hand tremors or limited range of motion is difficult, which is why having clickable images is so important. People expect to be able to click on photos, so this will definitely improve your user experience across the board.
Single Page Checkout
A multipage checkout gives shoppers more chances to leave your site before completing the sale, which is why many ecommerce sites use a single page checkout. This can benefit handicapped individuals even more than the average person because not having to click through to multiple pages to finish checking out can boost conversion rates even further by eliminating additional barriers.
Kate Pierce is the owner of LionShark Digital Marketing LLC, a West Michigan internet marketing company. Her areas of expertise include Paid Search, Search Engine Optimization, Business Blogging and Web Copywriting. She lives in the Grand Rapids area with her husband and son and enjoys cooking, watching sports, and spending time together as a family. Like a true digital marketing expert (i.e. geek), she loves talking about current marketing trends… so don’t say you weren’t warned!
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