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In this \article I’m going to take you how to make your law firm website accessible and welcoming to all.
What does the law say about website accessibility?
If your law firm website isn’t accessible to all users you could be sued for discrimination - commercial reasons aside there are also ethical reasons why you should comply to the Equality Act 2010. These laws have been introduced to deal with the issue of disability discrimination.
Making your website accessible to all is the law and right thing to do.
If a website is designed, coded and produced properly people with disabilities can use them. Making your website accessible benefits everyone, by removing accessibility barriers and opens up your markets, here are a few stats to consider;
- 940 million people have some degree of vision loss.
- 246 million have low vision and 39 million are blind.
- Between 5-10% of the population has dyslexia.
- 6.5 Million users in the UK alone have a mobility disability.
The above figures don't include users with temporary injuries like a broken arm. There’s no reason to exclude anybody.
What to consider when making your website accessible.
Start by understanding how visitors to your website who may have a disability interact with it;
- Some users have Motor disabilities and have difficulty selecting some elements on your website with a mouse.
- Users with vision loss, low vision or colour blindness find it hard to use websites that are low in contrast.
- Those users who are deaf or have poor hearing have problems with video or audio content unless a transcript is available them.
A good way to comply is to have your website tested by a group of users with motor and cognitive disabilities, blindness and other forms of visual impairment.
For further reading please visit the W3C working draft which describes best practices for making your law firm website accessible.
There are somethings you can do now to make your website accessible.
Below is a list of basic features you can do now to make your website accessible and welcoming to all.
How to make your images accessible.
When you are adding images via your content management system you will more than likely see a box that says “Alt Text”. This will allow you to add text which gives context and describes what the image is. This is then picked up by screen readers for those users who would have otherwise missed the image.
Worth noting alt text will help improve your site’s rankings in search engines.
How to make video content accessible.
Recorded, live video or slides with audio should have:
- Captions
- Sign Language
- Audio description in the video or a transcription.
Recorded video or slides without audio should have text descriptions or effective audio descriptions.
Recorded or live audio without video
Recorded audio needs effective text descriptions and real time captioning.
If you would like to learn more about this please visit WCAG 2.0’s guideline 1.2, on Time-based Media.
Make your navigation work via a keyboard only.
Your website should work without a mouse, this means if you want to be compliant your website’s features should be accessible via a keyboard only.
This is done by coding the pages so that users can navigate your website with their keyboard Tab keys. Pressing the Tab key allows your users to quickly jump to different sections on your law firm website.
Clearly label your online forms adjacent to the form fields.
When creating your online forms you need to make sure that each field is clearly labelled with what you would like to be entered. Then place your field titles or labels adjacent to its field.
Make sure you have a high contrast colour for the “send button”.
Choose colours for those with visual impairments and dyslexia.
Some users prefer specific colour combinations and others find it difficult to read text on certain backgrounds. If you can provide a feature on your website that allows users to change these combinations themselves then you can’t go too far wrong.
In general you will need strong contrasts for users with poor eyesight and slightly less contrast or colour combinations for those with dyslexia.