Is your SNO site accessible?

/in ,

In our Welcome Back report last month, we mentioned website accessibility and ADA compliance. SNO regularly runs checks to make sure our default site template settings are compliant, but since there are thousands of individual content and design choices available for you to make, it’s up to you to maintain that standard.

According to guidance from the U.S. Department of Justice, here are some important things to consider to keep your site accessible.

  1. Pay attention to color contrast: When designing elements on your site (whether it’s story pages or the homepage), make sure there is enough contrast between the text and the background color. For example, a neon yellow background with white text will not pass accessibility testing.

  2. Use alternative text on photos: SNO automatically generates alt text for your photos. By default, this alt text will be the caption of the photo. If you’d like to customize your own, you can do so by editing the photo in your site’s Media Library and filling out the “Alternative Text” field.

  3. Caption videos and/or provide audio transcripts: Before embedding video or audio content, consider adding captions to videos or providing transcripts for audio. Some sites even use the Story Body field to do this (like this example or this one).

  4. Set up forms carefully: If you have any forms on your site (Letter to the Editor, Story Ideas, etc.), make sure all fields and instructions are clearly labeled.

  5. Make sure the site has keyboard navigation: Basically, your site must be accessible via keyboard only. In our most recent round of updates, we took care of this one for you. Want to give it a try? Go to your homepage, click on your tab key, then tab through the different clickable elements of your site. To “click” on one, press enter or return on your keyboard.

There are many tools you can use to check your site’s accessibility, but here’s one we often recommend. This tool (and others like it) will provide you with a summary at the end, including a list of errors – things you should fix on your site for accessibility purposes.

If you have questions about any errors you see, feel free to send us a support ticket. We’re happy to help you fix them. For additional questions about website accessibility, please refer to this website.