Not everyone is able to read and view websites without assistance. You may have some visitors that require the use of screen reading and other assistive software to view your site.
Here are some suggestions for what you can do to make your site more accessible to visitors with disabilities.
Use the Alt Attribute Field to Describe your Images
When visitors use a screen reading program to read websites aloud, the program will describe the images displayed in the webpage using the text used as the image's Alt Attribute.
This allows visitors that may not be able to view your images to still have some information about what can be seen in your images.
As an added benefit, the text used in the images' Alt Attribute is also read by search engines and is used by those search engines to determine what content is displayed in your site. This also helps with Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Please note that many screen readers set a limit on the number of words characters that they will read out when reading Alt Attributes. For this reason, we recommend keeping the text in the Alt Attributes concise and less than 40 to 80 characters.
Click HERE to learn more on how to edit the Alt Attributes of the images in your Zenfolio account.
Add Subtitles to Videos
When displaying videos in your site, consider adding subtitles to the video during video editing. That way, when the video is uploaded to Zenfolio and it is viewed by your visitors, visitors will be able to make out dialogue and read descriptions of sounds in the video. This will help ensure that all visitors will be able to know what is happening in your videos.
Accessible Video Content
Try to keep blinking and flashing lights to a minimum in your videos. If your video editing program allows it, add subtitles with descriptive text to your videos. Especially add a visual cue to the video letting the viewer know when there is sound in the video.
Use Contrasting Colors
When displaying text in the site, use contrasting colors between the text and the background. This helps visitors that are color blind or have a visual impairment to read the text in your website.
The colors used in your site come from the theme applied to your website. The built in themes with the best contrast include Basic, Fine Art White and Magic.
Click HERE to learn how to apply a different theme to the pages in your site.
You can also create your own custom themes. With custom themes, you can control and colors and fonts used in your site.
Click HERE for how to create your own custom theme.
Use Headings
Headings are used to organize the content in a webpage. Most of the pages in your site will automatically have headings applied to the different parts of the page. But when creating custom pages, it is up to the photographer to designate the headings applied to the various text displayed on the page.
The Headings are marked as Heading 1, Heading 2 and Heading 3, with the headings decreasing in importance as the number gets larger.
Visitors used those headings to skim through pages to determine what content they can expect in each section of the page. Search engines also use those headings to determine the contents of the page.
The system also use the headings to apply different fonts, font styles and font sizes to each heading based on the settings in theme applied to the page.
Click HERE to learn how to apply different headings to text in your custom pages and how to customize the headings in your custom themes.
Other Website Design Recommendations
When choosing elements to display in your Self-Fulfilled products site, try to keep blinking, flashing and other distracting contents to a minimum.
Use the Welcome Message and About Message fields to display descriptive text that help to explain what visitors will see when they view the site.
You can also add text to those fields letting visitors know how they can play/pause slideshows and videos in your site.