How Web Accessibility Encourages Best Web Development Practices

The other day I was asked how screen readers could be used to make websites easier to use. The keys to answering this question are writing clean code and using web accessibility techniques.

Screen readers pick up untidy, unused or ‘left over’ code, which to a vision-impaired users is confusing. When descriptive Alt Text attributes are created, they assist vision-impaired users by providing information that allows them to create a mental picture in their minds of what is represented in images.

Alt Text is a tenet for accessible web design; however, it’s often taken for granted by novice web designers and developers.

In other blogs, I have outlined several reasons why web accessibility must form part of the web development process

There is now an additional reason: the South Australian Government will be soon introducing their new online accessibility policy. Please read about this initiative for further information. These intend to define accessibility requirements for public-facing websites.

At Edu Net Solutions, we have made web accessibility a priority since our inception. The next stage of our commitment will be to upgrade all our existing school website’s for free so that they will be compliant with the up and coming SA Government’s new accessibility policy. We aim to help to unify accessibility rules in our state and so we will continue to apply this policy to the websites of our private clients. You can check out an example of an accessible small business website from our portfolio