Accessibility
Creating accessible websites is critical for any customer-oriented website. Whenever possible, sites should be built to allow users to navigate and experience the site regardless of physical limitations. Apart from this ethical and principled standard, there are economic ramifications in not having an accessible site. For example, corporate sites have been successfully sued for discrimination under the Americans with Disability Act (ADA) for not having accessible customer-facing websites, and higher education institutions run the risk of losing federal funding for doing the same.
Digital Strategy leverages tools that conform to the standards for accessibility in our templates.
- Where possible, we go beyond the recommendations set forth in Section 508 of the ADA and conform to Level AA of the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, a more comprehensive set of requirements adopted by the European Union.
- We test our accessibility features using recommended tools and devices.
- We keep abreast of the trends in the industry and innovations in creating more accessible pages and work to keep our tools up to date.
What Can You Do?
- Make sure you are using the latest theme, templates and guidelines.
- Make sure foreground and background colors have a clear contrast. For example: always bold links and button text.
- Make sure text size, font and width is easily readable. For example; don't use uppercase text for long sentences or narrow fonts like Oswald for lowercase, longer content.
- Make sure the headers in your page are hierarchical - the level of header indicates priority of content to a screen reader. All pages have a hidden embedded H1. The remainder of the page can flow from this. It's important for the hierarchy of the headers to flow not necessarily the size of the header text. If you need to adjust the size of header element to maintain the proper hierarchy, it's ok.
- Always use ALT tags on your media.
- Do not place text in images.
- Make sure links open in the current window/tab or a new window/tab consistently. If the link leaves the current site or opens a pdf, the link should always open in a new window/tab.
- Make sure pdf files are accessible.
Check out our training resources for LinkedIn Learning courses and more.