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How to Make an Accessible Investor Website

by Innov8tiv.com

Credit: rawpixel.com via FreePik

Making your website accessible to everyone is just a good business decision. It increases the number of visitors and shareholders that can learn about your story and invest in your future.

So how do you optimize your IR website for a wide audience that includes people with disabilities? Take a look at the tips below.

Enable Keyboard Navigation

Not everyone will arrive at your site using a mouse. People with motor disabilities, the visually impaired, and power users may find it easier to rely on their keyboards to navigate the web at large.

To support this kind of navigation on your site, you’ll have to ensure your source code orders the interactive items according to the visual flow of the page — left to right, top to bottom.

Eliminate Automatic Content

Nobody likes cookie pop-ups, ads, notification alerts, and videos that play automatically. Clicking exit on all these at once is one of the biggest annoyances on the web for the average browser. But for someone with a disability, too many unexpected popups can make the Internet impossible to navigate.

These features can interfere with keyboard navigation or cause confusion for people with low vision, so try to keep them to a minimum. At the very least, make them optional, so visitors can hide popups and disable auto-playing videos.

Support Audio Components with Text Alternatives

If you upload webinars and videos sharing your brand’s story, you should support this content with easy-to-read transcripts. Adding captions to the videos and sharing free-standing scripts of the audio allows your Deaf and Hard of Hearing visitors access to this information without barriers.

Transcribing this information pays off in other ways, too. If you’re trying to rank on Search Engine Results Pages (SERP), you can leverage transcriptions to include relevant keywords, backlinks, interlinks, and meta data.

Consider UX for the Visually Impaired

Just like your Deaf and Hard of Hearing visitors, people with vision impairments need alternative ways to browse your site. There are a few ways you can help.

1. Choose Appropriate Text Sizes

One of the easiest ways to accommodate the visually impaired is by selecting a clear font at an appropriate size. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) recommends 12 points (or 16 pixels) for body text. Make sure it’s scalable by 200% so that your text won’t lose clarity or readability if a visitor increases its size.

2. Upload Images with Alt Text

Alternative text or alt attributes are a way of indexing the images you use on your site so that they can become hyperlinked search results. From an accessibility point of view, alt text is also an essential assistive device for visually impaired browsers.  Screen-reading tools will read this text aloud so that visually impaired visitors aren’t left out. 

3. Consider Color Carefully

You should consider the color of your text and background to help visually impaired visitors, especially those who are color blind. For normal text, a contrast ratio of 4.5:1 is the minimum required by the WCAG. For perspective, black text on a white page has a ratio of 21:1.

The Takeaway

There’s no single, uniform way shareholders and new visitors will experience your website. There are countless perspectives, objectives, and — more importantly — physical abilities that change the way people interact with your brand.

It’s essential your investor website accounts for these differences. Having an accessible site ensures your content reaches a larger audience.

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