Accessible websites don't discriminate.

To truly be accessible, a website must follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0), developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Preferably, a website should be at Level AAA to ensure that it is accessible by those who may have a disability or visual impairment.

However, accessible web design is not just about disabilities—it’s about reducing any barriers that the user may come up against when trying to access your site and the information on it. These barriers could be anything from the information on your site being too convoluted to understand when a distracted user is trying to quickly view on a mobile, to your site not being built in a way that can be read through a screen reader for the visually compromised.

Common examples of barriers that users may experience are that the text is too small, the colours don’t have enough contrast, the information is too hard to understand, or that navigating through the site is near impossible with a keyboard alone (no mouse). 

Here at Flux, some of the ways we help overcome these barriers are by ensuring a website works effectively with accessibility hardware and/or software, accommodates a range of connection speeds and displays properly on all commonly used Internet browsers. Web pages should be scalable to ensure they can be viewed on a number of common screen resolutions.  

The way in which website text is written plays a huge role when accessing a website via a screen reader. Links should be friendly URLs along with meaningful link text, and images on the site should have meaningful alternative ‘alt’ tags.

By following the accessibility guidelines and applying universal design principles to website design, we can make sure that your website can be accessed by everyone, no matter what situation they are in.