Creating a website that’s accessible to all – including those who are challenged by visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive and neurological limitations – can do wonders for your search engine optimization efforts.
In fact, it’s often said that a search engine’s web crawler is your site’s first disabled visitor. The crawlers are:
- Unable to see your images if you don’t use an <alt> tag to provide alternative information for images.
- Unable to extract meaning from your website content if you don’t offer text alternatives to identify audio or audio-video content.
- Unable to discern your content if you use Javascript navigation or Flash animation.
Many accessibility features are relatively easy to implement if they’re planned from the beginning or considered during a redesign. Fixing a website that has accessibility issues, on the other hand, can require significant effort. Here are some areas where there’s a beneficial overlap between accessibility and search engine optimization:
- Use standard web formats whenever possible.
- Use text instead of images when possible.
- Present clear and consistent navigation and page structure.
- Use proper alternative text for images.
- Provide clear heading structure and avoid empty headings.
- Providing descriptive keyword text links.
- Ensure descriptive and succinct page titles.
- Limit the use of Javascript, especially in navigation.
- Avoid interactions that depend on mouse movements.
- Provide transcripts and captions for video.
- Identify the language of pages and page content.
- Create multiple ways to find content: search, site map, table of contents, clear navigation.
- Provide useful links to relevant resources.
- Ensure URLs are readable and logical.
- Avoid Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and other stylistic markup as a way to present content or convey meaning.
- Define on-page abbreviations and acronyms.
Website accessibility can ultimately have legal implications. In perhaps the most famous case,Target paid $6 million in a class-action lawsuit stemming from its incompatibility with screen-reading software.
One way to make sure your site is compatible is to make sure alt text is used for each on-site image. You'll find the alt text option in the Advanced tab when placing or editing an image.