When it comes to physical buildings usually the first thing that comes in people’s minds is accessibility. But today, it applies to websites and digital as well. Though certain laws haven’t been introduced yet, the right time to ensure your site, as well as other digital possessions, are complaint is today.
Digital accessibility, on the other hand, refers to the practices of creating websites, digital content, and applications that can be utilized by everyone such as those who have cognitive, speech, auditory, motor, and visual disabilities.
Today, there’s a law that disallows discrimination against people with disabilities in all aspects of public life and it is called the American with Disabilities Act or ADA. Over the past couple of years, there is a lot more about this law because of many complaints with more than 800 sites accessibility complaints filed in both state and federal courts in 2017 only.
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With this in mind, companies, nowadays, are becoming more conscious of what is needed in order to make their sites more accessible to persons with disabilities.
Nevertheless, if you're actively managing the SEO of your website then you’re in nice shape from an ADA compliance viewpoint since a lot of SEO overlap with the standards of ADA.
To help you optimize your website and mobile application’s accessibility, here are some of the best SEO practices that you can implement.
The 7 best SEO practices that support ADA compliance
1. Video Tags and Transcription
For an interactive program to be ADA-approved, readable transcripts for both video-only media and audio-only media are needed. Coming up with accurate text transcripts ensures that you’re giving every search engine with descriptive and keyword-rich text.
But aside from that, you will need to have keywords, descriptions, and titles for your videos. Remember that having text associated with your video allows people to find videos like yours with ease.
2. Color contrast and size of the text
When optimizing a website or mobile app for SEO, do not use text as a photo and do not depend on color just to highlight the details but instead maximize the text’s contrast as well as readability.
3. Order of the content
Aside from the color and size of the text, it is also essential that your content is arranged in order. With this people will be able to tab through their content with ease.
Basically, it will look like:
- Main Navigation
- Heading (H1)
- Website sections
- Footer
In addition to that, having good semantic markup can be a great help.
4. Use heading tags and title tags
In order to navigate a certain page more rapidly, the majority of assistive technologies make use of headings. In case you didn’t know, headings can be a great help when it comes to clarifying the page’s structure for screen readers. It also ties into the SEO ranking factor related to quality content.
With title tags, on the other hand, people will be able to determine easily and quickly whether the details found in the page is relevant to what they are looking for and determine content by the title.
Furthermore, a title tag provides background as to what the web page is all about when Google will crawl it and how the page will look like in search results.
5. Image captions and alt tags
To comply with the ADA, images found on your website must have a clear description of the content of the photo. By simply doing this, screen readers will be able to determine and read the images properly. What’s more, this will provide search bots a clue about the images as well as if it is being utilized to point to links.
6. Descriptive link anchor texts
Keep in mind that the anchor texts on your website are descriptive. As a matter of fact, buttons and even texts labeled with “Click Here” aren’t helpful and ideal because they don’t communicate to the users what the results would be.
As a piece of advice, utilize a copy of the links to tell both the search engine and users what you’re linking to.
7. On-site sitemaps
An outlined and at the same time, a simple sitemap that has links to all main pages and sections of your site can offer an easy and fast solution for every user in order to understand the website’s content clearly.
Summing up
Making your mobile applications and websites ADA compliant is very important to avoid any lawsuit. However, if you don’t have any idea how to do it in the right way then consider following all the SEO practices mentioned above.
Better yet, hire a digital marketing agency that specializes in SEO, paid advertising, website design, Instagram growth and Twitter social media growth. As a matter of fact, such agencies have the best solutions possible for both large and small businesses.
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