Five Ways to make sure Your Site Is Accessible to the Visually Impaired

1. Create Allowances for Enlarged Text

Often times, simply creation text larger is all that a user require. Consider offering alternate style sheets with bigger font sizes and make sure your layout does not break when text-only zoom is enabled in the browser. Many visually impaired users will want to zoom in on the text without altering the scale of the entire site layout, which can guide to difficulties scrolling and tracking text over long lines.

2. Contrast is Key

Eye diseases like Retinitis Pigmentosa, Glaucoma, Retinopathy and cataracts all lead to a significant reduce in contrast sensitivity that is, the eye’s capability to differentiate between similar shades and levels of brightness. But today’s layouts are detailed-oriented, often utilize subtle gradients and slight shifts in value to make clean, modern, unobtrusive interfaces. For a user with normal eyesight, this makes for a very agreeable visual experience. To a user who struggle with contrast sensitivity, however, it can be a literal headache.

3. Be Mindful of Colors for Action things

Genetic colorblindness influence about 8% of all men and about 0.5% of all women to some degree. Then there’s acquire color blindness, which can effect from eye disease or injury and drives the total number of colorblind users still higher. It may not always be possible to offer these users an entirely different color scheme, and most users usually accept this. However, there is one place, where the use of color should be given the utmost attention action items. When creating buttons or notice that call the user’s attention and need their direct interaction, try to avoid using color combos that are easily confused by colorblind users and make sure these elements have clear, visible text or iconography that makes their purpose clear.

4. Let Desktop Users Browse Your Mobile Site

If you offer a mobile version of your web site, do not limit it only to mobile devices. Layouts optimized for the mobile web are classically, by nature, more visually accessible than their more grown-up counterpart. Elements are often simplify, more focus is given to text, and there is less overall visual clutter to potentially puzzle users who have blurred vision or difficulties with contrast and color. Giving anyone access to the mobile version of your site can be a quick way to enlarge accessibility without adding a lot to development costs.

5. Apply Keyboard Shortcuts to Aid Navigation

In addition to being helpful to persons with screen readers, keyboard shortcuts can make site navigation for the visually impaired user far easier. With the addition of keyboard commands, it’s likely to navigate a site with the use of arrow keys and some quick keystrokes, eliminating the need to follow a mouse cursor across a screen and the linked need to keep shifting visual focus. This can go a long way toward reducing eye strain and frustration. Many users with visual impairments surf the web on big monitors (23″ or bigger), which can lead to a lot of head and eye movement, mostly at shorter focal distances. The less time the user has to use following the cursor around the screen, the better.

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