Breakdown of a recent article that rants against accessibility and why this is so very wrong. A primer on accessible contrast, colors, and why this is important for the users of your website or app. Why visual designers still ignore accessibility and how this is improving slowly over time. What we look for pertaining to accessibility in SEO audits.

The controversial article: https://uxmovement.com/thinking/the-aesthetic-accessibility-paradox/
Accessible Colors: https://accessible-colors.com/
https://www.lockedownseo.com/service/seo-audits/

#LockedownSEO #webAccessibility #webAccessibilityContrast

Follow us on our other social media platforms:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LockedownSEO
Twitter: https://twitter.com/LockedownSEO
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lockedown-seo/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lockedownseo
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lockedownseo

Watch this episode of Tea Time SEO on the 30th of September at 4:00pm where Billie Hyde, Lucy Pickering and Bradley Webster joined us to share their tips to improve Web Accessibility!

Lucy is a CIM-qualified digital marketer focused on making websites work for all users. She is Web UX manager at The Access Group, a growing SaaS company with headquarters in Loughborough. She also works for herself as Nine Seven Digital, offering marketing, product management, SEO and accessibility. Lucy is a mentor for Women in Tech SEO and WYK Digital and writes about inclusive design for Silktide.com.

Billie is a Senior Account Manager & Training Lead at The SEO Works, where she splits her time between upskilling other SEO professionals and managing SEO campaigns for a wide range of clients. Billie worked across high-growth startups and global brands from local businesses to global publishers. In the last year, she has been focusing on advocating for more inclusive approaches to SEO and speaking about it to whoever will listen!

Bradley Webster, is an SEO Account Manager and Team Leader at The SEO Works. Recently, in his own time, Bradley has been working with a local charity specialising in providing sensory rooms to vulnerable people, helping them to expand on their site and improve their SEO while keeping it accessible and intuitive to use.

Transcript:

Why Choose Accessibility?
Often it can be hard to persuade people to make an accessible website. Why? Well, it can often be time-consuming, more expensive, and most don’t know where to start.

If you do make an accessibility-ready website, most will create one to avoid a lawsuit.

But I want to pivot that thinking. Accessible websites actually have a lot of benefits. For starters, it can give you significant is boosts in your website performance like better SEO

How Accessibility and SEO Work Together
1. A BETTER USER EXPERIENCE
Have you ever tried to navigate a website that is difficult to use, hard to read, or frustrating to navigate? It’s infuriating.

A significant aspect of web accessibility actually follows a really great methodology called K.I.S.S., also known as “Keep it Simple, Stupid.”

In other words, it means making your website easy to use so that the user doesn’t have to do any work. It should almost be like the screen is holding your hand and taking you to the right spot. For example:

In the U.S., we read from left to right, so having your most popular items appear first in the navigation can provide a quicker user experience for everyone.
Make sure your heading orders are correctly nested to provide a better reading experience.
Don’t use sliders. Slider’s scream for our attention and prevent us from reading the main content.
I think a company that does a great job of this is apple. No one keeps it as simple as apple does. I give thanks to Steve for showing us the beauty in simplicity. Your website isn’t meant to be flashy, that’s why we have video games. It’s a place to connect your customers with the information, tools, or services they need. Don’t make it harder for them to use what you’re trying to sell.

ALT TEXT AND KEYWORDS FOR IMAGES
Alternative text is used to provide an alternative to a visual item on a page. Such as images on a page like .jpg, .png, or .gif.

Please note that alt-text is different than an image caption. Captions are visible to all sighted users of a web page and sit below an image. The alt text is visible when the file doesn’t load, or it’s also what shows up on google images

VIDEO CAPTIONS/TRANSCRIPTS GETTING INDEXED
Video transcription are a text-based description of a video file. This is essential for someone who is blind and deaf. Transcripts allow deaf and blind users to get content through the use of refreshable Braille readers and other devices.

The SEO benefits here is that transcripts allow your content to be picked up by google spiders when they’re indexing your website.

CAPTIONS
Captions are text alternative of the spoken word presented in a video. Not only do they benefit people who are deaf. Studies have increasingly found that captions help everyone and provide a better user experience for the end-user. Happy users mean an increased likelihood of converting a user to a client.

Conclusion
Accessibility is a win for everyone. It provides a better user experience for all users and can help improve your marketing efforts.

I have a feeling in the future, Google will announce a significant update rewarding A.D.A compliant websites.

But till then, if you need any help with your web accessibility. Please contact us, and we would be happy to lend a hand.

https://www.sfwebaccessibility.com/

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be performed in a variety of ways, but ensuring that you are focusing on the foundational elements of SEO at the beginning will help the overall performance of a website for organic visibility. A solid foundation for SEO is built on three things: a fast and responsive website, relevant content, and authoritative signals. If a website owner forgets one of these three elements, it can cause many other issues moving forward when attempting to implement more complex SEO initiatives.

Join team members Tripp, Jeff, and Sheffield for this 50 minute webinar, where you will learn how to properly optimize your site for the three foundational elements of SEO, code, content, and credibility, and how to measure success with these three elements.

In this webinar, you will learn:

What factors you need to consider for success in the Organic Search Results
How these elements affect your site’s ability to perform in the Search Engines
What hurdles you may need to overcome to incorporate SEO tactics into your digital marketing efforts