WordCamp 2020 emphasized the importance of having an accessible site.
Amy June Hineline, Open Source Community Ambassador at Kanopi Studios, spoke at WordCamp 2020 about the importance of checking under the hood of your website. This ensures your site is accessible to all, responsive, up-to-date, and secure. Optimal website health requires two key elements: smart user experience design and a strong technical foundation. Without both of these, your website cannot meet the needs of your users. A major, but often overlooked, element of this is accessibility.
Why Accessibility?
Why should we care about accessibility? Most importantly, because it’s required by law. Even aside from this, there are other important facts to consider:
- An accessible website will include a wider consumer base for your content. You don’t want to exclude people from using your products and services.
- 26% of people living in the U.S. live with a disability.
- Even if you don’t need the accessibility now, you don’t want to have to go back and add accessibility later. Adding it after the fact will take more time to implement than if the site was designed around accessibility from the beginning.
Improve Readability
Grammarly was recommended as one tool (among many) that can be used to audit text content on site for style, tone, grammar, etc. There is a Chrome extension available for Grammarly, so the tools can be used as you manage your site. As a general tip rule of thumb for readability, website copy in general should be targeted to a 9th grade reading level.
Interested in learning more from WordCamp 2020? We got you covered.
