Create an Accessible Website Design to Accommodate People with Disabilities

1. Create an Accessible Website Design to Accommodate People with Disabilities A website design service for healthcare provides website designs that are ADA-compliant so that people with disabilities can also access your website. Today healthcare activities and operations are increasingly moving online and healthcare providers have their own websites where users can find information regarding consultation and also schedule appointments. To ensure the best user experience possible on their website, healthcare providers can seek the assistance of a reliable website design service for healthcare. When designing a website, you must take into consideration people with disabilities such as those with hearing loss, color blindness and other disabilities and how they interact with your website. People go online for a variety of healthcare- related purposes: researching their symptoms, finding physicians in their network, looking up reviews of different doctors and practices, paying their bills, and accessing test results. However, if a patient with a disability cannot have the desired information from the website, then the website has failed to meet an acceptable level of accessibility.

2. In the US, there are millions of people with various disabilities and the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1990 to ensure that businesses and public service providers made necessary steps to accommodate people with disabilities. However, in the present digital world, ADA legislation has not kept pace, and as a result, US businesses are struggling to understand their legal obligation to provide web accessibility to the disabled and comply with ADA. Web accessibility is the design of products, devices, or services in such a way that can be used by as many people including people with disabilities, such as impaired vision, motor difficulties, learning difficulties, or deafness. This makes all functions of the website including content, design, navigation, layout easily accessible. It ensures that healthcare providers provide an equal standard of care to patients with disabilities also. Good website design and accessibility always go together and Google rewards such design behaviors with increased visibility in organic search. Advantages of accessibility •Eliminates discrimination: If your website or app is developed to assist everyone then it means that you have created a platform that does not discriminate. Most of the healthcare businesses do not intentionally discriminate people with disabilities, but they tend to focus only on visual appearance rather than the fundamentals. By developing a website that meets the web design accessibility requirements, they can exclude specific functions or methods of communication vital to ensure access for people with disability and ensure that the website meets the needs of everyone without any discrimination. •Brand reputation: A website that meets the accessibility standards can boost your medical practice or healthcare business’s reputation as it would include a wider audience. This opens your business to new demographics which will drive more traffic to your website. Similarly, it can also make your website stand out among your competitors as it accommodates all users. •Increases usability: Having an accessible platform increases usability and developing an accessible design strategy could reveal usability problems that you may not have known earlier. It will also help those who access your website using mobile devices and technologically inexperienced audience. Features you should consider

3. The following are the features that healthcare businesses should consider to create an accessible web design. •Layout: A clear and simple layout is ideal whereas a cluttered design can be confusing. Users should be able to quickly react to the size of features and having a responsive website is vital for medical SEO. •Color:A clever color palette is essential for people who have problems with visibility. Don’t solely depend on color to identify key elements of your interface. Include text to assist these areas so that all users can fully interpret the information displayed and navigate smoothly. •Keyboard accessibility: Consider people who cannot use the mouse, which means designing websites in such a way that the users can navigate using only the keyboard. For example, using various buttons like arrows, spacebar etc to access website features helps people with mobility issues. •Navigation: Having clear indicators and short task allows smooth navigation. Make sure that the buttons are consistent, especially the call to action. Menu bars and search boxes should also be positioned correctly to logically guide the users through your website without causing any confusion. •Audio and video: Audio and video help in Interactivity in any design strategy. Including audio or video requires the use of accessible features, especially for platforms in the public sector. Users should be able to pause, stop, adjust volume and control captions. Providing subtitles is also a good idea for accommodating deaf users along with text versions of audio files. •Messaging: Messaging is useful for users who have reading difficulties, so you must think about the formatting of text. Speak in plain and simple English and don’t use long sentences or paragraphs. Make sure that you stay away from italics and uneven spacing. Testing Have a clear idea about all the objectives that you want to meet and design your website accordingly. There are many approaches available today that will help you spot errors on your website. You can also try some simple tests like unplugging mouse and navigating yourself around the site using only the keyboard. This will help test keyboard accessibility and increasing the size of your text shows you if your platform is accessible to those with impaired vision.

4. Another way of testing is the human trial and error method. You can test the platform with your target audience who are disabled and see how they react to your platform. If you find any of the features not working, then you can think of other alternative features. The overlap between website accessibility and SEO is gaining renewed attention. Website accessibility and good website design go hand in hand. This makes an accessible web design a very important consideration when providing medical SEO solutions such as plastic surgeon SEO. Google favors highly optimized websites with pertinent, optimized header tags and ADA-compliant code and design. A web page that Google is more confident about regarding both content and user experience is very likely to rank higher. Google could in the near future make accessibility also a ranking factor for websites and it would be ideal to develop web pages of excellent quality with accessibility techniques and meaningful content. Website design service for healthcare provides website designs that are ADA-compliant so that people with disabilities can also easily access your website. (800) 941-5527 www.medresponsive.com