With more than 15% of the world’s population experiencing some form of a disability, it is important to understand how a disabled person accesses information from your website. Accessibility is an important part of the designing your site and should be considered throughout the development process. Section 508 is the governing principle and it requires that all government information be accessible to disabled users.

Value of Making Accessibility a Priority
By making your website accessible, you are ensuring that all of your potential users, including people with disabilities, have a decent user experience and are able to easily access your information. By implementing accessibility best practices, you are also improving the usability of the site for all users.

W3C notes that, “accessibility overlaps with other best practices such as mobile web design, device independence, multi-modal interaction, usability, design for older users, and search engine optimization (SEO). Case studies show that accessible websites have better search results, reduced maintenance costs, and increased audience reach, among other benefits.”

Best Practices for Accessible Content
When creating digital content, make sure not to rely on color as a navigational tool or as the sole way to differentiate items. Also, images should include Alt text in the markup/code; complex images should have more extensive descriptions near the image (perhaps as a caption or descriptive summaries built right into a neighboring paragraph). And, always remember, functionality should be accessible through mouse and keyboard and be tagged to worked with voice-control systems. When able, provide transcripts for podcasts, and any video should include visual access to the audio information through in-sync captioning. Note when utilizing video, sites should have a skip navigation feature.