Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
Ensuring your content is accessible opens up your business to new–and potentially underserved–customers. Taking time to follow ADA guidelines shows all customers that your business is welcoming and thorough. Finally, following ADA guidelines will create a clear and easy-to-engage-with website, which benefits all visitors.
Here are five ways you can make your website and social media more accessible:
Ensure text is legible.
As artists, we may be tempted by the number of creative font and color choices available to us when designing our website, social media content, and digital resources like downloadable patterns. But for people with vision loss or colorblindness, some font and color choices can be difficult to read.
Opt for simple, common, sans-serif fonts like Arial or Helvetica over script or decorative fonts, especially for vital information like pattern instructions, website navigation bars, and product specifications. Use a large font in a color with a high contrast to your background. Black text on a white background is ideal, but if you want to use other colors, you can use an online contrast checker to ensure readability. The contrast checker, from WebAIM, will tell you both the contrast ratio and if your colors pass or fail according to guidelines laid out by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
Because screen readers don’t differentiate between colors and font styles like bolded text, make sure no important information is conveyed through those means alone. Limit emoji use in general, and try to only use them at the end of sentences. Finally, when using hashtags, capitalize each word for more legibility: #KnittersOfInstagram instead of #knittersofinstagram
Alt text
Alt text provides descriptions of images that can be read by those using screen readers, but it’s useful in other scenarios as well. In situations where using a less legible font is unavoidable, like an image of a logo, alt text provides another way to read the information. Alt text also displays in case an image fails to load–another example of how building an accessible digital presence benefits all visitors to your website.
Alt text should be short and to the point. You don’t need to describe every detail, but you should consider the context in which the image appears. A photo of you wearing a handmade sweater would have different alt text if you are using it as a headshot (alt text should emphasize you) than if you are listing the sweater for sale (alt text should emphasize the sweater).
If the image you are describing has a lot of information on it–like a flyer or lengthy product specifications–it’s better to duplicate that information in body text of your website or in the caption of your social media post rather than use alt text. For example, if you are sharing a flyer for an arts festival, your alt text can read “Colorful illustration of an artist’s palette” while the date, time, location, featured artists, and other information shared can be in the caption.
Similarly, if you share patterns on your website, make sure information from any pictures or charts is also conveyed in text.
Website Navigation and link text
When designing your website or newsletters, make sure any hyperlinks are descriptive. Say “Sign up for my mailing list” or “Visit my YouTube channel” instead of “Click here.” Aim to inform the reader where they’ll go if they click the link. Never paste a full hyperlink (https://…) into the body of a website, as screen readers are not able to read them.
If your link is an image, use alt text to describe both the image and where it links, i.e. “Cover of ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Knitting Supplies’ linking to Amazon purchase page.”
WebAIM’s Contrast Checker helps you test color combinations for readability and accessibility.
Captions
When sharing videos on social media, it’s helpful to include on-screen captions, both for viewers who may be hard of hearing and for people who might be in an environment where they cannot watch with audio.
When adding captions to your videos, you have plenty of options. Platforms like TikTok and Instagram enable users to add captions in the app when posting content, but these captions can be limited in style and must be edited on a phone. If you prefer to work in a browser, Canva has an autocaption feature available with free accounts. Because Canva captions behave like regular Canva text, you can style them to match your branded fonts and colors.
CapCut is another popular choice for captioning social media content, but CapCut’s auto-caption is only available with a Pro account. CapCut Pro comes with many other video editing features and templates for both mobile and YouTube-style videos, so if that appeals to you, a paid account ($179.99 annually) may be worth it.
Video descriptions
Similar to alt text, video descriptions of social media content like TikToks and Instagram Reels provide a brief description of visual elements in the video. Like alt text, you’ll want to keep this brief and consider the context of the video when deciding what to describe. Include essential information in the caption, not the video description.
More resources and creators to follow:
- The Blind Woodsman and Honeybee on TikTok crafts wooden bowls and shares vlogs about his life and process, with good examples of video descriptions.
- Irish fiber artist The Fairythorn has an accessibility statement on her website detailing the accessible features of her website and patterns.
- YarnAndy’s blog has an article specifically about improving the digital accessibility of fiber arts patterns.
- The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Digital Accessibility Hub goes in-depth on these and other digital accessibility best practices.
- The full Web Content Accessibility Guidelines has many resources for improving your digital accessibility.
For more on accessibility:
- Watch our webinar – Crafting an Inclusive Online Experience: Web Accessibility and ADA Compliance for Creative Professionals with Myrna Daramy
- Watch our other webinar on this topic as well – Bringing Accessibility Into Your Business with Renee Van Hoy
- Read our article, How to Make Your Website ADA Compliant: A Basic Guide by Carol Sulcoski
Sarah James
contributor
