SOURCE: Forbes

The goal of most busi­ness web­sites goes beyond being infor­ma­tion­al. Peo­ple are in busi­ness to make mon­ey, and rev­enue gen­er­a­tion is the ulti­mate goal of a busi­ness web­site. Every­one tells you to carve out a niche in your indus­try, but you still know that num­bers mat­ter and you want your design to appeal to the max­i­mum num­ber of visitors.

So, you mon­i­tor ana­lyt­ics, look­ing for traf­fic spikes and increased reach or engage­ment with con­tent. But are you poten­tial­ly exclud­ing many poten­tial cus­tomers, fans and fol­low­ers by not design­ing for accessibility?

Who does accessible design attempt to include? 

When design­ers talk about acces­si­ble or inclu­sive design, most peo­ple know to think about peo­ple with per­ma­nent visu­al, audi­to­ry or cog­ni­tive dis­abil­i­ties, among oth­er impair­ments. How­ev­er, the demo­graph­ic is actu­al­ly much larg­er than this. Acces­si­ble design also means think­ing about how to include peo­ple who may be tem­porar­i­ly dis­abled (e.g., those with a bro­ken limb) or peo­ple who have grad­ual shifts in abil­i­ty (e.g., the elderly).

To be even more inclu­sive, con­sid­er those who may not have the ben­e­fit of a high-speed inter­net con­nec­tion or who only access the web via a mobile device. Think about the sit­u­a­tions your web­site vis­i­tors may be in and design to accom­mo­date them. Will peo­ple be access­ing your site while in a stress­ful sit­u­a­tion? Is their envi­ron­ment typ­i­cal­ly bright and noisy or is it qui­et and dim­ly lit?

Think about the fact that your vis­i­tors may come from dif­fer­ent cul­tur­al, lin­guis­tic and socioe­co­nom­ic back­grounds. They may not be able to iden­ti­fy with or relate to the pic­tures you’ve cho­sen. And yet they still have the poten­tial to become great customers.

Based on my expe­ri­ence in the web design indus­try, here are my top four tips to cre­ate a more acces­si­ble web design.

1. Keep layouts clean and minimal.

Clut­tered lay­outs aren’t just bad design, they can be chal­leng­ing to under­stand and inter­act with. If vis­i­tors need to work too hard to fig­ure out what actions you’re ask­ing them to take or they can’t quick­ly find the answers to their ques­tions, they are like­ly to hit the back but­ton and imme­di­ate­ly exit your site. In the same vein, small ele­ments that are clus­tered too tight­ly to one anoth­er may prove dif­fi­cult to inter­act with for those with dex­ter­i­ty issues.

2. Use color wisely.

When think­ing about col­or on your web­site, go beyond how you see it. Con­sid­er not only those with visu­al impair­ments such as col­or blind­ness but also those who may be view­ing your site in bright sun­light on a mobile phone or an elder­ly user that may ben­e­fit from high con­trast ele­ments. Offer alter­na­tives aside from col­or that dif­fer­en­ti­ate parts of your nav­i­ga­tion from oth­ers so that vis­i­tors of all abil­i­ties can find and dis­cov­er your content.

Use color wisely

3. Put alt text, metadata and links to work.

This is yet anoth­er exam­ple of how design­ing for all can make search engines such as Google hap­py. Adding alt text to images was ini­tial­ly used to feed infor­ma­tion to screen read­ers and is now stan­dard best prac­tice to improve SEO. Oth­er clar­i­fy­ing infor­ma­tion such as cap­tions and text tran­scripts for video and audio files help users, while adding key­word-rich con­tent to your site.

Anoth­er oppor­tu­ni­ty to improve the expe­ri­ence for all is to ban the use of the “read more here” text hyper­link. It’s more help­ful to users and search engines alike if you use nat­ur­al lan­guage that describes that desired action or what will hap­pen after clicking. 

4. Remember, boring and consistent can be good things.

For those of us who work in tech or with web­sites every day, using the same inter­faces and fea­tures can get bor­ing so we invent new ways to style a but­ton or inter­act with con­tent. This may be great for mov­ing the field for­ward, but the major­i­ty of users are look­ing for but­tons to look and act like but­tons and for nav­i­ga­tion to appear in the “tra­di­tion­al” way.

While cut­ting-edge web design cer­tain­ly has its place, it’s arguably not on an every­day busi­ness web­site. Less tech-savvy users count on web design to be some­what sta­t­ic and con­sis­tent in form and func­tion. Vis­i­tors won’t give your site a chance if they have to learn a new set of rules on how to inter­act with your con­tent and will quick­ly become frus­trat­ed if things per­form dif­fer­ent­ly than expect­ed. When it comes to but­ton design, nav­i­ga­tion­al lay­out and oth­er struc­tur­al ele­ments, bor­ing is good.

Everyone wins when your design is inclusive.

Now that you have a few tips on how to make sure your web design appeals to a broad­er demo­graph­ic, the great news is that design­ing for a wider audi­ence actu­al­ly forces you to put some stan­dard web design best prac­tices in place. Accord­ing to usability.gov, stud­ies have shown that acces­si­ble web­sites per­form bet­ter in search, have reduced main­te­nance costs and enjoy increased audi­ence reach.

As it turns out, those of us who now inter­act with the web pri­mar­i­ly via smart­phone or voice assis­tants like Siri, Alexa or Google Home ben­e­fit as much from acces­si­ble design as any­one else. That’s what we call a win-win-win.