How To Improve A Website’s Accessibility Using The Express Editor
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When creating a website and keeping it up to date, user accessibility is crucial in ensuring that everyone can read and understand your website. This promotes inclusivity as well as helps to drive traffic to your site. This promotes inclusivity as well as helps to drive traffic to your site. You can integrate the following practices when creating a new website or making edits to an existing one.
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Adding Alt Text
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Alt Text is an image description that will display a message for users who use a screen reader or cannot see the images on your site. We recommend having a descriptive Alt-text for each image on your website to help users understand what is in the image.
Pro Tip: All stock images added from our free image library will have Alt Text automatically added. To add Alt Text to your uploaded images, check out our article here.
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Using Contrasting Colors
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When choosing your theme colors and customizing your text or buttons, the use of high contrasting colors is important for those with color blindness and other impairments. A single color for body text on a different colored background is highly recommended.
Pro Tip: Our intelligent editor will automatically recolor text or background if there isn’t enough contrast between the two to be legible.
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Paying Attention To The Font Size And Text Treatments
- Text can be formatted to make reading easier for people visiting your site with dyslexia or low vision. For example, you use common sans serif fonts with extra spacing between paragraphs and stay away from paragraphs of all capital letters with excessive use of italics and underlines.
- Text can be formatted to make reading easier for people visiting your site with dyslexia or low vision. For example, you use common sans serif fonts with extra spacing between paragraphs and stay away from paragraphs of all capital letters with excessive use of italics and underlines.
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Setting A Site Language
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Those who use screen readers and other assistive technology will want their tools to understand your site correctly. By setting up a site language, you will relay to those systems how they should interpret the accent, pitch, and speaking rate to best suit the language it’s written in. Check out our article on how-to set your site's language here!
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Reducing Automated Motion
- Reducing the motion from elements on your website will create more accessibility for those visiting your site with cognitive issues like motion sickness, epilepsy, or ADHD. For example, a great start is to turn off animations, avoid or limit using autoplay on videos, and use parallax scrolling sparingly.
- Reducing the motion from elements on your website will create more accessibility for those visiting your site with cognitive issues like motion sickness, epilepsy, or ADHD. For example, a great start is to turn off animations, avoid or limit using autoplay on videos, and use parallax scrolling sparingly.
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Enabling The Sitemap in the footer
- An enabled footer Sitemap that will display as a link at the bottom of your website will help screen readers read the hierarchy of your site and allow multiple ways for those visiting your site to access different pages and navigate through the information and content you have created. Check out our article on how-to enable your sitemap on your website.
- An enabled footer Sitemap that will display as a link at the bottom of your website will help screen readers read the hierarchy of your site and allow multiple ways for those visiting your site to access different pages and navigate through the information and content you have created. Check out our article on how-to enable your sitemap on your website.
- Using Nested Headings For Text
- Within the Express Editor, we provide a Title, Subtitle, and Description for most sections coded to a preset hierarchy that will give screen readers a path to follow and the structure of your website. When adding content, organizing text from Titles, Subtitles, and Descriptions will break up the areas and add visual interest to your site.
- Within the Express Editor, we provide a Title, Subtitle, and Description for most sections coded to a preset hierarchy that will give screen readers a path to follow and the structure of your website. When adding content, organizing text from Titles, Subtitles, and Descriptions will break up the areas and add visual interest to your site.
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Adding Descriptions To Videos And Images
- In conjunction with alt text, captions for images and videos provide another way to convey more context or caption what is happening within the media for the visually impaired or screen reader.
- In conjunction with alt text, captions for images and videos provide another way to convey more context or caption what is happening within the media for the visually impaired or screen reader.
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Using Text Treatments To Highlight Important Information
- Using multiple colors within the text to highlight important information on your site could be missed by visitors with color blindness or other visual impairments. Using a combination of text sizes and treatments like underlining, bolding, or italicizing text thoughtfully, meaning an emphasis won’t be lost to readers.
- Using multiple colors within the text to highlight important information on your site could be missed by visitors with color blindness or other visual impairments. Using a combination of text sizes and treatments like underlining, bolding, or italicizing text thoughtfully, meaning an emphasis won’t be lost to readers.