Enhancing User Experience with Visual Indicators in Web Design
Accessibility to Web content is the design principle that ensures people can use and interact with web-based content regardless of the level they are at. It is vitally important to prioritize accessibility for web users when designing and developing websites or applications.
Proper HTML markup is vital to the accessibility of your site. For example, using logical headers helps viewers to discern the layout of your web pages. It is important to include informative link texts and have enough contrast between colors.
WCAG Guidelines
HTML0 — The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are web standards to ensure application development accessibility. These standards are used by front-end developers as well as QA testers and others in the web team to meet basic accessibility requirements for web pages. WCAG includes 13 guidelines arranged around the four principal principles of accessible, observable, comprehendable and durable, referred to in the industry as POUR. Each guideline has testable success criteria that determine whether it is in compliance.
Unilever is an international conglomerate which produces more than 400 products sold in more than 2 billion homes globally and maintains a web site that balances web accessibility and an aesthetic design. Its site has been designed to meet WCAG guidelines on the use of contrast and color as well as keyboard navigation and structuring of headings.
A key feature of its site is the display of visual indicators to highlight which part of the web page has keyboard focus. This makes it simpler for people to browse through and comprehend the content of a page without a mouse, in addition to screen readers or other text-tospeech software. This approach is also recommended for websites that have keyboard-only navigation.
Semantic HTML
In addition to keeping both style and content separated semantic HTML can make your website simpler for assistive technologies to understand. When a browser processes well-written, semantic HTML, information presented is transmitted onto assistive technologies such as screen readers that interpret and converted into formats that the users require.
Additionally an appropriate use of landmarks — a set of HTML tags that identify the areas on your site – can help ensure that certain areas can be accessed via keyboard to text-to speech and screen reader people. Also, remember to include short explanations of pictures (also known as alt attributes) for those who cannot read or interpret images.
Keyboard Friendly Web Interfaces
Some users browse the web via the keyboard instead of the mouse. They can be skilled “power” keyboard users, or suffer from motor disabilities that stop them from performing the fine motor movements needed to use a mouse. The key is to make interactivity and navigation elements easily available by tapping and showing a visual indicator that indicates what is the current focus on your keyboard.
For example, if you’re using input fields for entering text, forms, or drop-down menus, make sure that they are tabbed and that they clearly indicate their current state web application development service. Screen readers as well as screen magnifying software utilize the focus indicator to identify which elements are being used at the moment.
It is important for all the text that appears that appears on a web page should be clearly legible and accessible. This is an essential aspect of website accessibility, particularly for users with vision or hearing disabilities or are blind and rely on assistive technology for navigation on your website.
Color Contrast
Using colors with adequate contrast will ensure that everyone such as people with color blindness, are able to read and browse web pages. Many people affected by dyslexia get benefit of high-contrast text, too.
Roles and Properties for the ARIA are used to describe the condition of widgets used to assistive technologies like screens users. For example”search” is a role “search” is used to mark a field in a form to indicate a search function. Roles are solid and they do not alter if the widget is changed, whereas properties are dynamic and change as a user interacts with the widget.