Our Hometown Blog

Improving Website Accessibility

At Our-Hometown, we are always working to research, develop and implement new ways to ensure our customers’ websites are accessible by all readers, including those with disabilities or visual impairment. It is important that our customers’ content is able to be enjoyed by everyone, and each and every year we move a little closer to achieving that goal.

Here are five basic measures that we already take on all of our sites to help improve accessibility for disabled readers:

1. All PDF content also displayed as HTML text. This means screen readers are easily able to identify and read any text content on the page.
2. Contextual links that describe destination. We avoid vague “Click Here” hyperlinks in site navigation.
3. Extracted image captions describe non-text content. Captions are included with images wherever possible, which can be identified and read by screen readers.
4. Use of Header Tags for Larger Text. Every page on our sites use at least one <h1> tag, then make use of additional heading tags in order (<h1>, <h2>, <h3>, etc). We automatically set all article headlines as <h1>.
5. Good contrast between the text and background. We keep contrast in mind when designing our websites and selecting color schemes. This allows for easier reading on any device.

New technologies are constantly being developed to improve accessibility for disabled readers on a wide range of devices, and as such, this topic will continue to evolve.

Our friends at FloridaWeekly have gotten ahead of the trend by adding a page for users to report any accessibility issues they’ve encountered on the website. This page includes the main points highlighted above, as well as a form that any user can fill out with details describing the issue they are facing. Check out FloridaWeekly’s Improving Website Accessibility page.

Interested in implementing your own page for reporting accessibility issues? Request that our staff set one up for you!

Share this Post: