Ada Compliance Seo
Today’s society demands websites that are accessible for everyone – ADA compliance is one way of making this possible.
Websites designed to comply with ADA are easily navigable, have appropriate contrast and alt text, are keyboard-friendly navigational, and contain form fields labeled correctly.
These features not only ensure ADA compliance but can also help boost SEO rankings and search engine visibility. Learn how you can optimize your site for both ADA compliance and SEO!
Alt text for images
Alt text is an essential component of digital accessibility, providing those with disabilities the means to read and comprehend your web content while giving search engines context for ranking pages for relevant searches.
Alt text is an essential element of SEO-friendly web development, providing people with visual or cognitive impairments, screen readers and image-blocking browsers an accessible understanding of your content.
As a general guideline, alt text should be as descriptive as possible in order to assist search engines such as Google in indexing the image and providing context to users browsing the Internet for such images.
Your image description should also provide context around its relationship to your site’s overall purpose and could also include target keywords if applicable.
Tread carefully with your descriptions; too much text may become difficult for screen readers and users to comprehend, making it harder for both parties to read the alt text.
Keep Your Descriptions Short and Succinct: Ideally, alt text descriptions should no exceed 7 words with no more than 125 characters to ensure screen readers don’t become lost in long descriptions or miss vital pieces of information.
Avoid Keyword Stuffing: For optimal performance on Google Image Search, your descriptions should be as specific as possible. If including keywords as part of an overall keyword strategy is the way to go.
Typically, it’s best to add alt text only where necessary and to images with meaningful content – this includes groups of images communicating one message and image maps with multiple clickable areas. Group alt texts should describe overall context while any clickable area should contain individual alt texts which explain where and why its links lead.
Captions for videos and audio
Captions are an invaluable way to ensure that your video content is accessible for viewers who have hearing impairments, improve SEO and increase engagement while making content more easily searchable.
Captioning for video isn’t a complicated process. To start captioning for video, first create a transcript of all spoken dialogue in your video by recording yourself or hiring someone else to do it for you. If doing it yourself, be sure to transcribe all sounds that contribute to a better understanding of the video (such as loud crashes or car horns).
Next, sync up the captions with your video’s audio so they appear on-screen at just the right moment and help your viewers follow along with what is being said and watched on-screen. This allows them to understand what’s being said while keeping their attention focused on watching your video.
YouTube and Facebook provide built-in captioning features to synchronize captions with audio; it is advised that before sharing a video online, auto-generated captions be edited for accuracy before they’re shared online.
For compliance with ADA standards, captions for videos and audio must be accurate, complete, and synchronized with spoken content – with at least 99% accuracy being the standard recommended by WCAG.
Provide captions in multiple languages so that viewers with hearing impairment can enjoy audio in their native tongue. This can be achieved either through providing translated caption files or by using closed captioning services that convert videos into subtitles files.
Finalizing caption optimization requires taking into account those with varied vision levels or who may not see font or color clearly, such as those who may have visual impairments. You can do this by making at least 9 point text font and adjusting background so they are visible for those with impaired sight.
No matter your goal – from interactive videos to more digestible content for students – captions are an integral element. They help those with hearing impairments access your material more easily while they can also benefit students with other disabilities, like English learners.
Text descriptions for images
Image descriptions are an integral component of digital ADA compliance, providing textual information for blind and visually impaired users. They also help search engines identify an image’s contents more quickly – ultimately increasing SEO.
Alternate text and long descriptions can be provided to describe photos, graphics, gifs and videos with visual content.
If your images do not include text descriptions, be sure to add one in their captions and on any webpage where they appear. One way is writing the alternative text directly into the alt tag of each image using your content management system or text editor and copying and pasting into CMS.
Your descriptions should be objective, clear, and engaging when read aloud; additionally they should sound natural when spoken out loud. Avoid making overly wordy or complex sentences for complex images like charts and graphs.
Consider whether your alt text is relevant to the content of the page before deciding whether or not to include it as part of an alt text or caption.
Descriptions should also be written so as to help both sighted and disabled visitors understand the information in an image. For instance, if it depicts a laboratory where one student serves as laboratory technician, an appropriate description might read as: “Clinical Laboratory Science.”
Remember to include keywords. This will allow search engines to recognize that your page is relevant for specific queries, increasing rankings.
If your instructor has provided an image as part of a research tool or module topic, finding words to accurately describe its nature can be daunting. A hierarchical tree diagram that is published in a journal requires more details than would cover images for its publication.
Text descriptions for video and audio
Text descriptions provide similar information as captions but in written text format instead of audio format. They can be used to explain spoken or non-spoken content from videos that may be difficult for people with hearing or visual impairments to comprehend.
Video content often combines visuals and audio tracks, so adding captions for this type of media is critical for its understanding. Captions provide text versions of spoken-word audio tracks while also including any sounds important to understanding its content.
Captioning is a quick and straightforward way to make your website or app accessible for users with hearing or visual impairments.
Integrating descriptions directly into an existing narration is often the best practice, since this allows for accurate synching up between description and original audio and caption display on screen. This way, captions appear when spoken or generated sound occurs on-screen and descriptions.
One alternative is extended description, which temporarily pauses playback while it describes certain details or fills gaps between scenes with natural pauses. This approach may be particularly beneficial when there are many details that require clarification or natural pauses are few in video content.
Prioritize what needs to be covered given your available time. Your descriptions should enhance rather than diminish the video experience.
Make sure that your descriptions fit naturally within the natural pauses in the video, particularly for videos with lots of visual information; this is also beneficial when creating short pieces that do not provide enough opportunities to describe.
As soon as you start developing a video, it is crucial to keep accessibility provisions in mind from the very start. Doing so will make video production simpler and less costly while simultaneously giving viewers access to an accessible version of your content.