The Top 7 Tips to Make Your Website More Accessible to the Impaired

Rick Henkin

People with physical impairments represent a significant portion of web users and they have income to spend. A few simple changes to your website will not only make it easier for them to use, but will also put you way ahead of your competition.

Here are 7 quick power tips you can use to make your website more accessible:

Provide alt tags (alternative text descriptions) of all images

Allow for font resizing. Use relative sizing (%), not fixed sizes

Use captions for video and audio. Create transcripts of audio messages

Avoid "click here" or "more..." links. Describe what the link is (you should be doing this anyway)

Use simple language. Write clearly with short paragraphs

Avoid moving text

Improve navigation. Let users know where they're going and where they've been

According to the U.S. Department of the Census (1997), there were 54 million Americans with disabilities and in 2000, a Harris Poll showed that almost 22 million of them were online. That's too big of a consumer market to ignore and that was 9 years ago. The numbers will be even larger now.

ARTICLE DATE: 2009-07-05
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