When creating a website, you must keep in mind that your website is going to be accessed by various types of people, including individuals with visual and auditory impairment or cognitive or physical disabilities. So, how are you going to make your website accessible to people with disabilities? Well, Drupal 8 migration can help you eliminate this stress. Read ahead to discover how Drupal development services can enhance your website’s accessibility.
But before jumping into the topic, let’s first understand what web accessibility is and its significance.
What is Web Accessibility?
Web accessibility is all about making your website accessible to the widest possible audience, including the challenged people.
According to an international community, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web accessibility means that websites, technologies, and tools should be designed and developed in such a way that they can be easily accessed by people with disabilities.
As a leading Drupal development company in India, we suggest enterprises go with Drupal development services to build websites that are best suited to people with any disability.
Why Web Accessibility Matters?
1. It Helps You Increase Your Audience Base
Web accessibility allows people with disabilities to enjoy equal access and opportunity, which helps in increasing your audience and effectiveness.
2. It is Good for SEO
Good web accessibility is considered to be one of the best practices for SEO as it helps in boosting the visibility of your web page.
3. It Facilitates Business Growth
Building an accessible website helps you expand your reach to a wider audience and grow your business.
4. It Helps You Build Positive Publish Relations
Web accessibility helps you stand out from the crowd by making your business accessible to everyone and demonstrating social responsibility. All these help in building your online reputation.
WCAG 2.0 Checklists for Web Content Accessibility
Level A
Below are the most basic web accessibility features:
Level AA
This is intended for dealing with the biggest challenges for users with disabilities:
Level AAA
You may refer to WCAG 2.0 checklists for more guidelines.
How Can Drupal 8 Migration Help Enhance Web Accessibility?
As an experienced Drupal development company in India, we can confidently say that Drupal 8/9 is the best solution to improve the accessibility of your website. Investing in Drupal development services can be fruitful in improving your website’s accessibility, especially if you’re operating an eCommerce website. Many eCommerce business owners use content management systems to manage their stores. Some content management systems are best suited for people with disabilities and one of them is the Drupal platform that offers core accessibility features that make your website easy to interact with for disabled users. If you have special requirements for improving web accessibility, you may hire Drupal developers from us to get the best-fit solutions.
Here’s how you can improve the accessibility of your website with Drupal 8 migration:
1. Images with Alt Tag
Images play a key role in improving your website’s accessibility, especially if you’re having an eCommerce website. People prefer seeing product images than just reading the text-only description. You can use images that are of high-quality and present your products most pleasingly.
To improve your website’s accessibility, you need to accompany every image (except borders, arrows, etc.) on your web page with a descriptive text. This descriptive text should be placed in the Alt tag of the image so that the images are indexed by search engines.
The Drupal 8 version comes with the alt text by default. If you don’t add descriptive text to the image, it won’t be uploaded in the media library. Apart from getting the SEO benefits with Drupal development services, you also help people with poor eyesight or those who have lost it to access your website easily. They can learn what’s in the images using screen readers.
We Suggest
Adding a precise and relevant description of the images so that people with disabilities can learn who or what is demonstrated in the visuals. Use simple words when adding the alt text so that it is understood by the search engine or even a layman.
If you’re new to the technical stuff, you can reach out to us to avail our Drupal support and maintenance services.
2. Update Notifications
These days, businesses use modern websites that are very dynamic and frequently update their web content without reloading the entire web page. This creates a problem for people with poor eyesight who rely on screen readers to extract information from a website.
A screen reader is a sequential tool that scans a web page in a linear order and therefore, fails to track updates in a section of the web page where it’s currently not positioned. Due to this problem, disabled users may not know that a new blog post or content has been added to the web page.
Drupal 8 addresses this issue by exposing the Drupal.announce() JS function. It has a string argument that shows a message to a user about an event that has just occurred on the web page. The screen reader reads this string so that the visitor is informed about the latest update. So, this is the benefit that you enjoy with Drupal 8/9 websites.
3. High Contrast
From the accessibility perspective, a website should have the right contrast between the background and the content. As per the W3C guidelines, this contrast ratio should be at least 4.5:1.
There are several online tools available that can help you determine the current contrast ratio of your website. Drupal 8 offers themes that are built with accessibility in mind and all have high contrast. This helps visitors with poor eyesight or those who cannot distinguish among colors to navigate the site and extract information comfortably.
4. Input Validation
To err is human. People tend to make small or big mistakes and this often happens at the time of filling out forms on web pages. Most modern software applications can smartly detect errors in form fields and notify the user about the mistakes by displaying an appropriate message and changing the field color where the error has occurred.
With previous versions of Drupal, these error messages were kept above a form with the corresponding fields repainted to a different color. This created a problem for visually impaired users who could not distinguish one color from another and thus couldn’t find a relation between the message and the field. This issue could not be fixed even by screen readers.
With Drupal 8 migration, there is the Inline Form Errors module that places the error message next to the form field where the error has been made. However, the module is not enabled by default.
5. Site Navigation Using Keyboard
Some people may have difficulty in gripping the mouse in hand. This is when a keyboard can be used to navigate a Drupal website with ease. Drupal 8 has addressed this problem by providing the tabbing manager, a JS feature. It’s linked to the constrain() method. The latter accepts a collection of page elements that can be iterated by pressing the Tab key. If there’s a page element between two elements in the group, then that particular element will be omitted. This feature is beneficial for visually impaired users.
So, these are some of the benefits that you enjoy when you hire Drupal developers.
Wrapping Up
These are the core Drupal 8 features that can help you create a website that is accessible to people with disabilities. Apart from leveraging the benefits of the default Drupal functionality, you can hire Drupal developers for custom Drupal development services to improve the accessibility of your site.
As a renowned Drupal development company in India, we help enterprises with Drupal 8 upgrade and migration, third-party integration, Drupal support and maintenance, managed services, and more.
Here’s how we can help you to improve your Drupal 8 site’s accessibility.
Get in touch with our Drupal experts for dedicated Drupal support and maintenance services.
FAQs
Q.1. Why should I outsource the Drupal project to Drupal India?
Ans. Drupal India is a reputed and the most trusted Drupal development company in India that is committed to offering top-notch Drupal development services. When you hire Drupal developers at Drupal India, you are assured of getting:
And a lot more.
Q.2. How quickly do you respond?
Ans. Our proactive Drupal experts respond as fast as possible. You can reach out to us at any time and our experts will address your concerns within the shortest possible time.
Q.3. Is Drupal best for my website?
Ans. Drupal is a free, open-source content management system that can be installed without the hassle of purchasing any license or recurring charge. Additionally, Drupal offers a wide array of modules and third-party integrations that be used for developing a powerful website that caters to your requirements. Moreover, it is SEO-friendly and the platform is supported by a large, active community of developers, designers, and enterprises.
