Accessible content is content without barriers. If it is accessible to people without having to jump through hoops with or without their assistive technology, it is also accessible to search engines!
I guide you and your team to understand the “why”. Once you understand that, I’ll show you how to make and keep your content accessible. You’ll be surprised how doable it is.
No, of course you wouldn’t! And neither will any potential customer who – for whatever reason – depends on a screen reader.
Text with too small a font size sucks, period. Why would you expect anyone to buy a product from you when the details are impossible to read?
That hurts, doesn’t it? It may even send you into a cold panic, when you know that a particular piece of communication is of importance to you!
Video is content. If there is speech in it, and you don’t provide closed captions, you lock out people who can’t listen to it. Either because they are deaf, or because circumstances don’t allow turning on sound.
By the way: Google loves closed captions too.
I wrote an article about why captioning videos is beneficial in more than one way.
Unimaginable, you say? It’s exactly what many travel agencies do to their online visitors. The number of online travel agencies that does not add alt text to the images of their great vacation offers is dizzying. As if people who are blind don’t travel?
How would you feel, looking at a travel brochure where you only see white squares where the images were supposed to be? Not cool!
Assumption is the mother of all screw-ups. Clothing sizes in the US are not clothing sizes in Europe. Heck, even within Europe there are different size. Size 40 in Italy is not like 40 in Germany or The Netherlands. Using unclear sizing like S, M, L and XL on a site in Europe will catapult potential buyers away from your online clothing store. And the other way around.
Besides the fact that people’s online attention span is very short, reading extreme long and complex sentences is just tiresome.
If a sentence has a lot of subordinate clauses, chances are you can break that down into understandable individual sentences.
This benefits all your visitors, human and search engine bots alike.
The “Pick a date” link below takes you to my Calendly page. If you have issues scheduling there, please send me an E-mail.
Ever been to a physical store where signs are unclear, and employees don’t seem to care nor know anything. Teeth gritting, right?
It’s the same with unclear site and on-page navigation. No matter how fancy your page is. When, for example, every link says “click here” or “read more” it’s useless.
Because both the visitors who depend on screen readers and Google will get a list that says: click here, here, read more, here.
© 2023 Anne-Mieke Bovelett
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