If you want to design a website, you should not forget about an important group of users. There are people who have an impairment and therefore depend on accessible website design.
We will explain what an accessible website is. What do you need to consider if you want to create an accessible website and what role does CAPTCHA accessibility play in this? The effort you have to make for an accessible website is manageable. But by doing so, you will reach additional people and make a social contribution to more accessibility on the Internet. Our checklist for an accessible website will help you make your content available to the broadest possible target group.
What is an accessible website?
An “accessible website” is one that is designed to be easily approachable and usable by as many people as possible, regardless of their physical, technical or mental abilities.
There are different impairments that make it difficult for website visitors to understand your content. The most common hurdles you can eliminate by creating an accessible website are:
- Problems with vision
- Problems with hearing
- Difficulties understanding text
- Difficulties with the structure
Fortunately, there are solutions to these hurdles that you can consider when creating an accessible website. This applies to any form of website even if it is only required by law for certain websites to be accessible [1]. The most important rule when creating an accessible website is to be aware of the problems that other people might have with your web design, presentation and structure.
What are the requirements for an accessible website?
To make it a little easier for you to create an accessible website, we’ve summarized the key points below to get you started. The result is an accessible website checklist. The first two points about text and images are quick and easy to implement for any website. The points after that go deeper into the structure of the website and give you a brief introduction to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
The texts
The texts of your website play a crucial role in two ways. First, you should choose the font size and color so that people with low vision or visual impairments can read it easily. Don’t choose the font size too small and make sure it has good contrast. You definitely won’t go wrong with black text on a white background. For better readability, the font size should be at least 15 or 16 pixels.
One point that many web designers underestimate is the comprehensibility of the wording. Not all people can read fluently and struggle to understand complex issues. You can influence whether your texts are easy to read and understand. There is even a free tool that helps you rate your texts. The Flesch Index evaluates the comprehensibility of your texts. Short sentences with short words are much easier to read than long nested sentences with technical terms. You can additionally increase the readability of your texts with stylistic means such as bulleted lists.
The images
Beautiful and appealing images are a good addition to a successful website. However, you should also keep people with impaired vision in mind here if you want to create an accessible website. For example, when choosing motifs, you can make sure that you do not select images that are problematic for people with red-green impairment.
For people with a visual impairment, you can also provide images with a so-called alternative text. This is a short description of what can be seen in the particular image. Many webmasters use alt text only for search engine optimization, when in fact it is an important tool for accessible websites.
In the case of videos, for people with limited hearing, make sure that you offer a subtitle feature to make audio content accessible to them.
The structure of your website
When creating an accessible website, take the time to develop an accessible structure. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) provide such a framework. The WCAG are a set of guidelines to make web content more accessible to people with disabilities.
The WCAG guidelines for accessible web content cover a range of topics, including:
- Making text content accessible
- Providing alternatives for non-text content
- Designing for visual impairment and blindness
- Designing for deafness and hearing loss
- Designing for physical disabilities
- Designing for cognitive and neurological disabilities
- Provision of translations and captions
You can test your website for WCAG 2.2 compliance against defined success criteria, providing comprehensive assurance that your website is accessible.
How can Friendly Captcha support the design of an accessible website?
If you want to make your website accessible, then you should also look at your forms, login and registration areas. On the one hand, these are important so that visitors to your website can connect with you. However, at the same time, depending on how they are configured, they can be a major hurdle for people with impairments.
This is due to the widely used reCAPTCHA tests that are built into forms to protect against spam and automated attacks. The tasks to be solved for this purpose are especially challenging for people with a visual impairment. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) therefore consider such a captcha to be highly problematic from an accessibility perspective [2]. To solve this problem, we at Friendly Captcha have developed an accessible captcha. For Friendly Captcha to distinguish between humans and computers, neither certain images need to be clicked nor other tasks need to be solved by users.
Our accessible captcha solution is GDPR compliant and runs in the background while the contact form is being filled. This is convenient for website users while providing you with reliable protection against spam messages and mass attacks.
With Friendly Captcha, we help you to make your website accessible to all users and do your part for digital inclusion. Find out more about Friendly Captcha and protect your website from cyberattacks with an accessible solution.
