This article will explore the benefits of using an accessibility overlay tool for websites and help make your website more accessible. In addition, we will examine the purpose of an overlay tool and explore the insights that websites owners can gain from using such a tool.
What is an Accessibility Overlay?
An accessibility overlay tool is software that checks your website for errors and alerts you to any problems with its content, design, or code. This can be an invaluable resource if you want to ensure compatibility across all devices.
There are many different tools available to help you use an overlay tool. A popular script is “WAVE,” which can be downloaded free from the WAVE website.
Using An Accessibility Overlay Tool
The most obvious benefit of using an accessibility overlay tool is highlighting any errors or issues with your website’s content, design, or code. Often simple things like incorrect links can cause problems for blind users, but these can be picked up by an overlay tool.
This information in itself is extremely valuable because it will allow you to repair the errors before they become a problem, rather than after your site has launched and started to gather negative feedback because of its downfalls in usability. The sooner you know about them, the easier it will be to fix the problems and improve your site.
The second (and equally valuable) benefit of an accessibility overlay tool is that it can increase user engagement on your website. When you produce a website, there are many different elements to consider: the layout. A poor layout can make content difficult, if not impossible, for users to read and understand. An overlay tool highlights these issues (such as an inaccessible table design or too small text size). It allows you to visualize them to correct them before they cause problems instantly.
Finally, using accessibility overlays also benefits search engines such As Google because it produces more accessible content, giving web crawlers a better idea about what your content covers and encouraging better indexing and ranking.
How to Implement An Accessibility Overlay Tool
The exact details of implementing an accessibility overlay tool will depend on which script you decide to use. However, there are some common steps involved in implementing this type of resource:
- Check What Needs Addressing – First, look through your website and identify the key issues that need addressing before you start implementing any changes. For example, if you choose WAVE, it’s good to remove all unnecessary pages, files, and resources because the search engines won’t index them.
- Prepare for Testing – Next, prepare your site for testing by removing all menus and rollovers only to contain text content (and no images). This makes it easier for you to identify accessibility errors because you can see what needs fixing without any distractions.
- Run the Overlay – Finally, run the overlay over your site and check all of the results it provides. Look at each item individually to determine whether or not it is an issue that needs changing, then go through every error one by one to resubmit your website for testing. You may need to do this several times before you’re 100% happy with the final result, but it will be time well spent when you realize how much improvement there is on your site.
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