ACCESSIBILITY BEST PRACTICES
Accessibility promotes a user-friendly experience and allows the widest range of users to engage with your content. Two vital reasons to ensure your content is accessible:
Accessibility promotes a user-friendly experience and allows the widest range of users to engage with your content. Two vital reasons to ensure your content is accessible:
Federally-funded agencies are required to make their content accessible to people with disabilities.
Alternative text (also called alt text) provides a helpful written description of a visual element on your webpage. Accurate alt text is essential for accessibility, UX, and SEO. Screen readers and search engines will crawl this text, so the alt text needs to be clear and concise.
Alt text should be used for:
When writing alt text, ask yourself, “What information am I trying to convey with this image?” Answering this question can help you write clear and helpful descriptions.
Avoid using phrases like “image of…” or "graphic of...” in your alternative text. Assistive technology provides this information automatically.
Avoid applying comments that attempt to editorialize the image. Use “Blonde woman standing alongside a green car” instead of “Blonde woman standing in an alluring pose alongside a green car.”
Alternative text should be:
Descriptive links make content accessible and easy to understand. They should accurately describe where they direct users once clicked.
Descriptive link text should:
When creating links, remember the following:
Many tools can help check for the right color contrast. TPGi has a helpful color contrast checker with additional information about color contrast.
Tables are difficult to make accessible, and they’re tricky to make responsive. When a table loses the relationship between the row and column headings and the rest of the content, it may be inaccessible for screen reader users.
If you have other ways to organize information on the page, try those first. Tables are best used for what they were designed for — tabular data.
If you must use tables, keep these guidelines in mind:
Check out this example of a table with a row heading and a column heading.
The row headers are Ball and Block. The column headers are Name, Color, Shape, and Size.
Name | Color | Shape | Size |
---|---|---|---|
Ball |
Red |
Circle |
Small |
Block |
Blue |
Square |
Medium |
Check out the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 for the latest updates on making content more accessible.
Sitecore makes it easy to include alternative text to any images, graphs, or diagrams you upload into the system. It will also alert you when alt text is missing and needed.
Sitecore allows you to insert a table for tabular data using the Table Wizard.
How well your web content can be accessed and received by all users, including users with a disability. This is especially important, and legally mandated, for our government websites. It is a great idea to take a deeper dive into accessibility standards when writing content for CT.gov.
Text describing the appearance of a visual element on a webpage. It is indexed by search engines (SEO) and read aloud by screen readers (accessibility).
Decorative images don’t add any unique content or message to a page. They are only used to accent a message or make a webpage more attractive. These types of images should be classified with an empty alt tag (alt="") to avoid audible clutter for screen readers.
Please note: Right now, Sitecore (our CMS) does not allow these types of alt tags. Instead, use …
Dynamic changes to the layout of a webpage depending on a user’s device, behavior, etc. Responsive design makes websites faster and more accessible.
(Search engine optimization) Improving web content for rankings in search engines. Common SEO practices include keyword research and link building. Alt text and descriptive links are crawled by search engines, so optimizing this text is a great idea for boosting SEO value.
This CMS houses most of the web content for our CT.GOV-Connecticut's Official State Website sites. Sitecore is where you can edit pages, add alt text, etc.
(User experience) How the user interacts with/ experiences your web content.