How to make an accessible website on WordPress

Web accessibility has become a vital task for all web designers and developers. As web accessibility laws have rolled out in various countries, it’s important to comply with accessibility policies such as ADA, AODA, WCAG, and more.

At Azuro Digital, we provide accessible web design services that support people with all sorts of disabilities. We focus on optimizing our websites for accessibility not only to comply with laws, rank higher on Google, and enhance conversion rates, but also because it’s simply the right thing to do as human beings.

Here’s how we make our websites accessible:

1. Use an accessible website builder

As a web creator, you have a myriad of options to choose from when it comes to the technology that you leverage to build the website. When making your decision, we recommend researching the tools to ensure that they include all of the critical features for web accessibility.

We use Elementor, which comes jam-packed with most of the important accessibility functions.

Here are the important technical features that Elementor offers to improve accessibility:

1. Image ALT Attributes
2. ARIA-Labels
3. Accessible Forms
4. HTML5 Semantic Elements

2. Add the advanced accessibility features

While Elementor offers most of the essential accessibility features, it’s still lacking some of the more advanced features to make the website as accessible as possible. This is the case for almost all website builders. You simply need to add an extra plugin.

We recommend integrating the One Click Accessibility plugin to add all of the extra bells-and-whistles for accessibility. This plugin is free and developed by the Elementor team, so it integrates seamlessly with Elementor.

This plugin allows users to resize fonts, change page to grayscale, change links to have underline, and much more.

3. Follow design best practices

While using the right technology will help to make your website accessible, there are certain things that rely on your own skillset as a designer.

For starters, you need to ensure that you have enough color contrast so that users can distinguish between different elements and/or read the content easily. For example, if your text is white, don’t place it on a light background, and if your text is black, don’t place it on a dark background. There needs to be sufficient color contrast between the text color and the background color.

Another factor is to ensure that your font family is easy to read. Avoid fancy fonts that are too curvy, crammed, or simply awkward and difficult to follow. Use simple, clean and modern fonts. You also need to make the default font size large enough for most people to read (even people with minor visual impairments). To achieve that result, for most font families we recommend a font size between 16-20 pixels for the body text.

For more information on web accessibility best practices or to get a comprehensive proposal for your project, get in touch with us here 🚀