Accessibility | Glossary

Headings can help to ease the ability of an individual with visual or cognitive difficulties to digest and understand content. To that end, you want to regularly break up content with descriptive and accurate headers and subheaders. Doing so will allow you to describe sections and make it easy for individuals using technology-assisted reading programs to navigate your website.

Of course, this is important for more than WCAG guidelines. Appropriately formatted content is easier to read, and additional headers and subheaders allow you to enhance your SEO.

Images or infographics can be a key piece of any website content, often used to enhance a written point or for search engine purposes. However, if you are writing for accessibility, images may present major challenges, as not everyone can see the image in front of them. If that is the case, you need to ensure you have an image you write with appropriate alt text.

Alt text is what someone will hear if they cannot see the image. Alt text should be highly descriptive and accurate, displaying exactly what is happening in a photo. For example, "ball thrown" isn"t descriptive enough. "A tennis ball thrown by an adult to a child" is much better.

Alt text also has an additional benefit: Highly accurate alt text that captures appropriate keywords can help boost your SEO and bring more people to your website.

It is important to remember that not everyone can appropriately see or hear audio or visual content. To that end, you should transcribe all content so an individual with hearing difficulties can read it. Automated Closed Captioning software may be able to assist you in this manner, but that software is not always completely accurate. You"ll need to bring in additional humans to confirm the accuracy of any closed captioning software.

An accessibility audit may determine that your content isn"t meeting appropriate metrics for accessibility. If this is the case, you may be inadvertently excluding a wide swath of the population from being able to read your content. Fortunately, it"s never too late to change your content to be more inclusive.

Sometimes, you may need outside experts to audit content and ensure it appropriately meets WCAG guidelines. You"ll need to ensure that you work with writers with an array of qualifications and expertise, including in the area of WCAG guidelines and the subject matter you use.

This last point is critical: You can"t afford to hire the cheapest writer when writing an article. Doing so leads to creating substandard content that doesn"t fit your needs. Instead, you need subject matter experts who understand your content and the importance of accessibility.

Creating content for your website may not be enough: You may need content audited and updated. Furthermore, you may need to create an entire content strategy that will allow you to research the highest-performing content that meets your personal or business objectives.

If you need outside assistance in this process, you"ll need to hire experts in content strategy who can work with you to understand your business objectives, align content with those principles, and optimize content to ensure you get the most out of every word.

AI has become very powerful when it comes to content creation. However, relying on AI-based tools to solely create your content leads to writing that can be generic, inaccurate, and fails to stick to WCAG guidelines. To that end, you need to work with writers who use AI but don"t overly rely on it. Thankfully, there are several AI tools writers and editors can use to ensure that the content created is 100% accurate, meets your business needs, and is edited appropriately.