How to Make Your Blog Accessible to Disabled Users with accessiBe
Have you seen all of the news and PR disasters about ADA Compliance lately? It’s amazing how many big name businesses and brands are getting in trouble for not having online businesses and sites that are accessible to those with disabilities. It’s happening all the time, and what’s even crazier is that most site owners and brands are not only aware of the hefty fines and liability risks, but also how simple it is to actually fix the problem while making your site and business more accessible in the process.
The other aspect of all of this is, how would you feel if someone went to your website or blog and wasn’t able to read your content or fill out a contact form? It probably wouldn’t make you feel too good, and it’s kind of embarrassing as well.
As bloggers and humans in general, if you saw someone in a wheelchair that was trying to get into a store but they couldn’t open the door, wouldn’t you go and open the door for them? The same applies to someone that might not be able to see, wouldn’t you help them pick something up if they dropped something?
Just because we spend most of our time creating content and doing business online, it doesn’t mean that we can forget about the millions of people around the world with disabilities that prevents them from enjoying your site and content like others are.
The good news, is that there are now much more cost effective and easy solutions in place to get around these problems. Just like how WordPress has made the process of site building and content creation a whole lot easier, accessiBe is doing the same for ADA compliance for site owners and brands — and best of all, it’s easier to implement than you might think.
Using AI to Make Blogging Accessible
As content creators and bloggers, we often don’t think about the many different types of people that might be accessing our sites and content. After all, we are great at blogging, creating content and getting it noticed through social media — but probably not in programming or designing something to make our sites more compliant.
However, just like we mentioned how WordPress has made the process of content creation and blogging a lot better, technology and automation is working in our favor as well. In fact, this is the same type of technology and advanced solutions that accessiBe is using to help site owners and bloggers make their on-site experience better for their readers and customers.
Through the use of automation and AI-powered machine, sites are being scanned every 24 hours to check for new, revised and updated content to make sure visibility and usage is always compliant. accessiBe automatically learns the site’s components from top to bottom to provide screen-readers with essential data using the ARIA set of attributes
The thought of having to comb through all of your existing and new site content to make it ADA compliant would be a complete nightmare, along with being too timely and expensive for most bloggers to even consider.
For example, one feature you have to adopt in order to make your site ADA compliant, is assign alt-texts to every descriptive image in your website so that blind people can experience them through screen-readers. Can you imagine how long that would take manually? This is where accessiBe’s AI-driven OCR technology kicks in, as it recognizes the images in your site and automatically assigns the appropriate alt-text after understanding what the image contains.
This is why accessiBe has continually been in the news for their advanced platform that makes the internet a more user-friendly place for all, no matter your disability or location.
A Look at accessiBe’s Accessibility Interface
It’s one thing to be a blogger or site owner and having a few thousand people visiting your site each week. It’s another to be a big name brand that has millions of dollars in transactions flowing through your site daily.
When you start to think of it in these terms, you can only imagine how many people might be visiting their sites that have special needs in reference to reading content or having full accessibility on a site.
A perfect example of this would be a popular blog like NeilPatel.com. If you’ve ever done any type of research for online marketing or business, you’ve probably ended up on his site. To show you how amazing and efficiently accessibe’s accessibility tool is, let’s take a look at how it’s currently in place on his site and blog.
Right away at the bottom corner of the page, you will see a handicap icon. Once you click it, the Accessibility Adjustments window will popup on the screen and provide a number of features and solutions to make the on-site experience a whole lot better for a number of people with limited viewing issues.
Of the many countless adjustments that can be made to Neil’s site, the readable font, text magnifier and word spacing adjustment are some of the most commonly used. All of these features are in place to make the content of your site more accessible and more enjoyable for your audience.
Again, jumping back to the fact that many of us are bloggers and we rely on WordPress to create amazing looking sites and content for our sites, our content and text placements might not be ideal for everyone visiting our sites. Thanks to accessiBe, all it takes is a click of a button and users can make the text on your site larger or smaller, while also changing the font style.
However, not all site viewing experiences rely on just the formatting of smaller and larger text. It can also be in reference to the colors, contrast and saturation of content on your site as well. Again, changes to all of these components are possible through the accessiBe tool. All it takes is a simple scroll down to the “Color and Display Adjustments” settings and you can change the colors, contrast, saturation and more.
As you can imagine, when your audience is visiting thousands of sites of the course of each month, they are going to enjoy some more than others. And not every visitor is going to enjoy the fonts and colors on your site, no matter how pretty you might think they are.
By providing your audience with the necessary tools and settings to customize their user experience, this can ultimately lead to more engagement, leads and sales, brand loyalty and more.
At the end of the day, we are all spending a lot of time to create high-quality content for our sites — but most of us are forgetting about the PWD audiences that are likely hitting our sites daily.
Now that we’ve had a chance to show you what’s possible with accessiBe and how it can make our site content more accessible and enjoyable, it’s time we discussed how to actually set it up. And you will probably be surprised and excited to find out that will likely only take a few minutes time — no matter what CMS or site template you are currently using.
How to Install accessiBe on your WordPress Blog
With WordPress being the most popular CMS and blogging platform in the world today, it’s probably best we focus on this solution. It also makes sense because accessiBe already has complete implementation in place with WordPress as well.
Here’s how to install accessiBe in just a few short minutes on your site or blog.
Step 1 – Head over to accessiBe and grab the embed code for your site. (see it here)
Step 2 – Log into your WordPress site and click the “Plugins” tab, and then “Add New”.
Step 3 – From here you just need to search for “Insert Headers and Footers” plugin and then click “Install Now”.
Once this process is completed, it should look like the following:
Step 4 – Go to the main menu in your WordPress dashboard, select the “Settings” tab and click “Insert Headers and Footers”.
Step 5 – From the first step in this process, you should have obtained your embed code from accessiBe. Now is the time to copy that code and paste it into this “Insert Headers and Footers” area.
That’s it! If you did everything correctly, your site should now be connected with accessiBe and ready to go. With this connection and implementation in place, your site will also now be ADA compliant based on regulations that accessiBe follows.
Lastly, as popular as WordPress might be, I’m sure there are some bloggers and site owners who might be running off a different platform or CMS. Should that be the case, you can visit this page to see implementation instructions for nearly any website or blog.
accessiBe’s Pricing Plans
As you can imagine, such a technology and service couldn’t be free, but the good news is that it’s competitively priced.
For just $490 annually, site owners can instantly become ADA compliant thanks to the solution provided by accessiBe. Not only will this provide your site with the necessary tools and features to improve the on-site experience for all visitors, but it will also allow your company and brand to rest at night knowing they want have any pending ADA PR disasters or legal issues in the future.
For the average blogger, this price might seem a bit out of range, but when you consider the cost of not having a site with all of the features mentioned in this article, it’s really not that much of an investment at all.
Even better, they also offer a free 7-day trial. This means you can set your site up with all of the settings and tools we demonstrated with accessiBe, then you can see if it’s right for you and your audience.