What Does WCAG Mean?
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are a set of best practices that enable people of all abilities to interact with your website and access all the functions and features it has to offer. Being WCAG-compliant allows people with disabilities that use assistive technology to easily interact with your website. Not only does that make your users happy, but it makes you happy since you will have a much wider audience for your website.
Everybody can agree that a website with good contrast, easy to read text and a clean layout is far more appealing than a site that is difficult to read and navigate. And by now, everyone realizes that being mobile friendly is crucial since more and more users are likely to be accessing your site on a smartphone or tablet. But, did you realize that being easy to use on any device also makes your website more amenable to assistive technology users? And, the easier a site is to use, the more likely your visitors will be converted into customers.
Where WCAG meets SEO
Besides having good communication design, there are other ways that WCAG best practices can give your site a competitive edge. Providing Alt tags on images, labeling links, using proper heading level structure and clearly labeling web pages will enable users of assistive technology to use your website. And, these same practices go a long way towards encouraging Google and other search engine crawlers to index your site. In a nutshell, the easier you make it for a search engine to find out what your site’s topics are, the better your chances become of being ranked as a top result for those topics.
There are oceans of advice and guides available to educate you about SEO but at its core is a basic principle: how relevant your site is to a search term someone enters into a Google search. A lot goes one in that second or two in between clicking “Search” and viewing a page of results. Not only does Google need to scan through its index and match your search term to a website’s topic, but it also needs to determine how useful your site will be to the searcher. This is calculated by ranking sites on ease of use as well as topic relevance. And, when a site is built to be WCAG compliant, its usefulness is naturally enhanced by following those guidelines.
WCAG is Win-Win
As you can see, following the guidelines for making your site accessible to ALL visitors, including those who use assistive technology, is more of a benefit than a burden. First, there’s the advantage of a clean and clear design which is appealing to everyone. Then, you have built-in search engine optimization which comes with tagging images with descriptive text and labeling your navigation. And then, there’s the third benefit: happy users who will become loyal customers for what you are offering. Not to mention, being WCAG-compliant can keep you safe from legal action based on the Americans with Disabilities Act, should users not be able to access vital information on your site.
In summary, being WCAG compliant can not only reduce liability, but also offer several tangible benefits to your pages conversion rates, and SEO scores. Company Maker has the skills and expertise to identify and address WCAG shortcomings on your website. Contact us for a WCAG upgrade!
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