As a business owner, it is your responsibility to ensure that your website caters for everyone and that you don’t limit the accessibility of your website for users with a disability. Your website should be accessible for people with disabilities that can impact how they use the internet, such as:

  • Auditory
  • Cognitive
  • Neurological
  • Physical
  • Visual
  • Vocal

How To Make Your Website More Accessible For Visually Impaired Users

Optimise Images With Alt Tags

Images are often one of the biggest accessibility barriers for users with blindness or poor vision. On any given page or article, imagery is used to enhance and explain, meaning the author can be less descriptive in their content.

In order for users with visual disabilities to experience the page fully, it is crucial that you add alt tags to all the images on your website. Users who are visually impaired rely on assistive technology to read out text on the screen, however, these technologies can’t translate an image. You should add alt tags to every image so that they can enjoy and experience the image just as much as you would.

Accessible Font Sizes

People with poor vision can’t read small font sizes and will struggle finding all the necessary information they need to sign up, make a purchase or just simply be informed. When browsing the web, they will use the settings in their browser to enlarge the font – but this might break your layout. You should provide an additional style sheet that enables visually impaired users to enlarge the font size whilst keeping the layout fully intact.

Colour Contrast

When designing your website and branding, keep colour and contrast in mine. Certain vision impairments cause people to have low colour contrast sensitivity which makes colours blur together and be hard to distinguish between.

Ensure you use high contrasting colours on the foreground compared to the background. Black and white are the most readable, however, black text on a yellow background or yellow text on a blue background also work well.

Keyboard Navigation

Without sight, navigating around a website comes with many challenges. Unable to use a mouse, visually impaired users use their braille keyboard to navigate and click. Your website should enable them to navigate between all items and access everything they would be able to with a mouse. Interactive elements include:

  • Anchor text
  • Dialog boxes
  • Drop down menus
  • Forms
  • URLs
  • Widgets
  • Multimedia

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