Website Accessibility: Making Your Site Usable for Everyone

An estimated one billion people globally live with some form of disability. In Kenya, the 2019 census identified 2.2 percent of the population, approximately 900,000 people, as living with a disability, though advocacy groups suggest the actual figure is significantly higher. When your website is not accessible to people with visual impairments, motor difficulties, cognitive disabilities, or hearing loss, you are excluding a substantial portion of potential customers from engaging with your business.

But accessibility is not just about disability. It benefits everyone. Curb cuts were designed for wheelchair users but are equally useful for parents with pushchairs, delivery workers with trolleys, and travellers with suitcases. Similarly, accessible web design improves the experience for all users, including those on slow connections, older devices, or using your site in challenging conditions like bright sunlight.

Understanding Web Accessibility Standards

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, known as WCAG, are the international standard for web accessibility. WCAG is built around four principles that form the acronym POUR: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust.

Perceivable means all users must be able to perceive the information presented. This includes providing text alternatives for images so screen readers can describe them, ensuring sufficient contrast between text and background colours, and making sure content does not rely solely on colour to convey meaning.

Operable means all navigation and interactive elements must be usable by everyone. This includes making the entire site navigable by keyboard alone for users who cannot use a mouse, ensuring interactive elements are large enough to tap on mobile, and avoiding content that flashes rapidly which can trigger seizures.

Understandable means content and interface behaviour should be easy to comprehend. This involves using clear, simple language, providing helpful error messages on forms, and ensuring the site behaves in predictable ways.

Robust means the website should work reliably across different browsers, devices, and assistive technologies. This requires clean, valid HTML and proper use of ARIA attributes when standard HTML elements are not sufficient.

Quick Wins for Website Accessibility

You do not need to overhaul your entire website overnight. Start with these high-impact, relatively easy improvements that address the most common accessibility barriers.

Add descriptive alt text to every image on your site. Screen readers read this text aloud to visually impaired users. Instead of "image1.jpg" or "photo," describe what the image shows: "Team of web designers collaborating at Cyril Creatives' Nairobi office." For purely decorative images, use an empty alt attribute so screen readers skip them rather than announcing uninformative file names.

Ensure all text meets minimum contrast ratios. Body text needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 against its background. Large text, defined as 18 pixels or larger, needs at least 3 to 1. Use the WebAIM Contrast Checker to test your combinations. This single improvement has one of the biggest impacts on readability for everyone, not just users with visual impairments.

Make all interactive elements keyboard-accessible. Tab through your entire website using only your keyboard. Can you reach every link, button, form field, and interactive element? Can you tell which element is currently focused? If anything is unreachable or the focus indicator is invisible, those are barriers that need fixing.

Structure your content with proper heading hierarchy. Use H1 for main page titles, H2 for major sections, H3 for subsections, and so on. Screen reader users navigate by headings the way sighted users scan a page visually. A proper heading structure makes your content navigable and understandable for assistive technology users.

Add captions or transcripts to video and audio content. If you have promotional videos, testimonial recordings, or audio content, providing text alternatives makes them accessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing users, and also benefits users who cannot play audio in their current environment.

Accessibility and SEO Are Allies

Here is the compelling business case that should eliminate any hesitation about investing in accessibility: many accessibility improvements directly boost your SEO. Google's crawlers cannot see images, watch videos, or interpret context the way humans do. They rely on the same signals that assistive technologies use. Proper heading structure, descriptive alt text, fast loading times, clean HTML, and mobile responsiveness are simultaneously accessibility best practices and SEO ranking factors.

By making your website accessible, you are not choosing between doing good and doing well for your business. You are doing both simultaneously. At Cyril Creatives, accessibility is built into our design and development process from the start, not bolted on as an afterthought. Learn more about our web design approach or discuss accessibility improvements for your existing site.