To make a website WCAG compliant, ensure the site has clear navigation, high contrast, alternative text for images, keyboard accessibility, and meets HTML coding standards.

As more and more of our world moves online for various reasons, accessibility is becoming an increasing requirement on the Internet. The pandemic has accelerated this trend, and it is now abundantly evident that all websites must be accessible, regardless of the law.

Although websites that comply with WCAG 2.1 are coded according to accessibility standards, it is simple for a site to stray from compliance through the routine content entry. Or maybe you’ve never given accessibility a high priority, and you’re only beginning to make changes. In either case, here are five quick steps you can take right away to increase the content accessibility of your website.

1. Review / Revise Acronyms & Abbreviations:

Numerous businesses and professions use acronyms and abbreviations often. What is frequently forgotten is how screen readers understand those. Similarly, certain acronyms might be confusing. P.O.W. would be spoken like the action in a comic book, while P.O.W. would be pronounced like “Prisoner of War.” Consider the possibility of misinterpretation by someone who hears rather than sees the content on your website by reading it aloud to yourself.

2. Remove All Caps:

All caps are frequently used as an easy way to designate something as a heading or to signify more importance. Of course, we usually use spacing and punctuation in website content, which helps reduce confusion. However, because capital letters give words a consistent shape, they are harder to distinguish at a glance and harm reading. The title case is said to be simpler to understand visually and cognitively.

3. Use Sequential Heading Structure:

HTML headings follow a similar format to an essay outline. There should only be one “H1” at the top of your website. This heading communicates to readers and search engines what the main subject of the page is. The title of your website or blog post will normally be this. The remaining heading values, H2 through H6, specify the page’s content hierarchy. Users frequently scan titles to identify a part to read. Therefore screen readers rely on them to guide them through a carrier. These users won’t be able to correctly browse your content if your page skips heading levels or uses heading levels incorrectly.

4. Alt Text:

When an image link is broken and cannot be shown, alternative text, often known as the alt text, appears. And it’s much more helpful than you might think. Alt text is useful for SEO since it helps search engines better grasp the context of your website. But even more crucially, alt text is what a screen reader reads out loud. This description enables people with poor or no vision to understand an image’s content without looking at it.

5. Descriptive Links:

Almost any website has a ton of links. There will undoubtedly be several links to other parts of your website or external websites, from the navigation bar to the footer. The “read more” link is one of the most prevalent links in the material. Generic expressions like “Learn More,” “Read More,” “View,” and “Click Here” convey little information to assistive technology, which frequently scans a page’s links and merely presents them to a user without any more context. In fact, Google penalizes this kind of connection when determining a website’s SEO score because it is so discouraged. And yet, this is a very widespread practice. Read more links are used frequently on Kanopi’s website as well. So how can you get around this ambiguity?

However, this approach is more frequently employed in templated regions that automatically provide material with read-more links because it necessitates some behind-the-scenes programming. You might only want to include a button or link to give the reader more information while adding text to your website. When that occurs, it’s crucial to remember that the link itself may be evaluated independently of the surrounding material. Your SEO and accessibility will benefit from your descriptiveness.