Over 90% of websites are fundamentally broken, actively limiting access to content and reducing engagement as a result of not following the standards and structure that make the web more usable and accessible for all.

In a 2021 study, The Baymard Institute uncovered that 94% of the top grossing e-commerce websites were not accessible.

“Basic accessibility issues severely disrupt those users who need accessibility considerations,” says the study, “and will prevent some from being able to effectively use the site to purchase products.”

WebAIM’s 2021 study of the 1,000,000 most popular websites uncovered that 97.4% of home pages had detected WCAG 2 failures.

The 6 most common web accessibility issues

These are the 6 most common (and easily fixable) web accessibility issues, as reported by WebAIM.

This lack of accessibility contributes significantly to the digital divide, but the issues that are making websites so broken impact much more than accessibility. That’s because the lack of accessibility is a symptom of underlying issues that impact usability, content engagement, performance and site management.

Going even further, many organizations don’t consider the mix of content, design and code that’s required to properly execute, maintain and effectively deliver a website that forms the hub of an exceptional omnichannel customer experience.

Let’s explore these gaps in more detail.

Here are three key questions everyone should be asking about their website:

1. How does your website best serve your marketing, sales, product, service and support teams?

Your website serves a series of cross-organizational purposes. Across sales, marketing, product, service and support, through to a cohesive customer experience, your website is a driver for activity and engagement across your organization.

Often, website objectives are driven by marketing, but talking to and identifying the needs of all the different organization stakeholders who rely on your website to engage with customers will uncover key use cases, content and transactional goals from across your organization.

These cross-organizational objectives will influence not only the design, but also the platform chosen, the features needed and the content strategy necessary for success.

2. How can your website effectively engage your target audience(s)?

Depending on the unique nature of your organization, there are potentially numerous external audiences that will rely on your website. These audiences can include any number of customer groups, partners, suppliers, job seekers, investors and more.

It’s essential to understand where these visitor groups are in their customer journey—what stage of a purchase or product cycle they’re in—to understand how your website will play a role in serving each customer group, while aligning to your cross-organization objectives.

This understanding of your audience will help shape the information architecture, content, calls to action and user flows across your website in order to grow audience engagement.

3. What is the right website platform for your organization?

Once you’ve established a content plan and defined transactional website flows that support your organizational and audience objectives, it’s time to consider the technology that will power your website.

With so many website and code platforms to choose from, the considerations of your staff and audience, as well as standards for performance, accessibility, content management, customization and ongoing management will form the basis for determining the best platform for your organization.

My team at Say Yeah has surveyed the top website builders and web development platforms in order to rank how well they support you in meeting website accessibility standards and requirements. Explore your options in-depth with the Website Builder Accessibility Review.

If you’re looking for more insight on the capability and performance of your current website, the Essential Website Audit answers two critical business questions:

Is your website broken?

How can you fix it?

This is your path to understanding how your current website platform supports your organization and what next steps you can take to better leverage your website as a critical marketing, sales, product, service and support tool.

You can achieve so much more with your next website refresh

It’s not always easy to know where to start when you’re reviewing the effectiveness of your website, planning to launch a new site, or looking to meet accessibility objectives. Remember to ask these three key questions in order to deliver a more effective, manageable and engaging website.

1. How does your website best serve your marketing, sales, product, service and support teams?
2. How can your website effectively engage your target audience(s)?
3. What is the right website platform for your organization?

This is the foundation for delivering a more inclusive website that helps your business better serve the full scope of your market, with your website as the hub of an exceptional omnichannel customer experience.

Looking for additional support on making a more usable, accessible, and inclusive website?

Get started with our Essential Website Audit to uncover issues with your current website, or get in touch to learn more about our inclusive website design services.

Get in touch

The post How to build a more accessible website for your business: B2BeeMatch appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Among your potential customers, the majority of people have some form of vision need, from wearing glasses (or perhaps forgetting them), to trouble seeing contrast or colour, to a total loss of sight.

These different needs align with various design, product, and service considerations.

Let’s take a look at some key considerations for your website.

Considerations for blind users

Screen reader and keyboard navigation: your website, mobile application, or other software needs to have the ability to be navigated by keyboard and screen reader commands only, which requires the use of tab-key-based navigation and proper headings or landmarks on the page.

Text-first content: Your digital product and available content should not rely heavily on one mode of communication, such as images. To maximize content engagement, ensure that text is used to communicate information. Any images needed for context should have alternative image descriptions (also known as “alt tags”).

Considerations for other vision needs

Text size and zooming

People with certain vision conditions may require the text on their screen to be viewable at a larger size and zoomed in for increased visibility. Your product should accommodate a 200% zoom without compromising the appearance or requiring unintended horizontal scrolling.

Contrast is critical

Text needs to be at a high enough contrast level to ensure that even if someone is colour blind or has low visual acuity, the text is still readable and stands out from the background. For example, black text on white has the best colour contrast, and other combinations can be tested using a colour contrast checker.

Colour contrast isn’t enough

Ensuring an interface doesn’t rely on colour to create meaning or signify a change of state is critical. That’s because 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women are colour blind.

As an example, designing an error on a form to add an icon or symbol alongside explanatory text—not just a red outline of a form element that needs to be reviewed—helps this notice be understood by those who may be colour blind. In this case, they will be able to see the icon and take action as they otherwise may not have noticed the colour change.

This rule can be applied to your menu navigation and highlights as well, where you should include a shape change (such as an underline on a selected menu item), not just a colour change.

All of these different considerations can affect a large portion of your potential customer base. By considering these eyesight accommodations you’ll be well on your way to increasing access to and engagement with your content, products, and services.

Get started with making your website accessible

Not sure where to start?

Make your website more usable, accessible, and inclusive for all with the Inclusive Website Audit. Don’t miss out on expanding your reach and engagement!

Order an audit

Ready to take the next steps with your website?

Better serve your whole market with an accessible website that’s designed to support your business and increase engagement across your entire audience.

Get in touch

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No judgement. Most websites are, so you’re not alone.

That’s because, when people are making a website, they typically focus on a combination of creating engaging content and a great look and feel. Even if you also focus on code alongside these areas, you’re likely missing out on issues that make your site more challenging to use for many people.

This standard way of working isn’t conducive to considering all the ways people interact with websites. It’s assumed that everyone uses a mouse or touch, when many other people use a screen reader or keyboard. We simply weren’t taught with this in mind, and most organizations—whether you’re building a website in-house or working at an agency—simply don’t fill in the gaps in this learning.

In general, there are three typical ways people interact with your website:
1. mouse/touch;
2. voice (such as listening to the content of a website using VoiceOver); and,
3. keyboard.

If you’re like most digital professionals, you primarily think through interactions with mouse and touch. However, without considering these other interaction models, your site will be broken for those people who rely on assistive technology or a keyboard-only way of navigating the web.

Why do these issues matter?

There are several impacts on your users if your site doesn’t consider accessibility, especially these alternative modes of navigation.

Limiting access

If your site is only optimized for touch and mouse/trackpad interaction, you’re limiting the potential users of your website before people even get the chance to decide if your content or product will meet their needs.

Frustrating users

Often these issues make the experience more difficult or frustrating to use, even if users can get around them. If users get stuck inside a modal or have to listen to repeated content over and over again, they will quickly give up on trying to use your site, regardless of how great your content might be.

Violating accessibility compliance legislation

In addition to issues for users accessing your site, not implementing these changes can also pose a problem if you or your organization are required to meet accessibility standards.

Your site needs to accommodate and be fully functional for screen readers, keyboard-only users, and other accessibility needs to meet standards like AODA (Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act).

Complying with this legislation is especially crucial for larger organizations and public sector organizations.

What can you do to fix these issues?

There are two key areas to tackle to fix these accessibility and usability issues:

1. Test your site yourself/with your team

2. Test your site with a diverse group of users that reflects your market

User testing photo shot by UX Indonesia

1. Test your site yourself/with your team

To find and improve these issues, you must go through your website using accessibility tools like VoiceOver to see how a screen reader reads the site, and to see where this functionality might be broken or difficult to use.

This testing process should also include using your site with the keyboard ‘tab’ key and seeing if you can jump from element to element without using your mouse/trackpad.

Pro tip: it’s much easier to understand how your website is broken by using VoiceOver and your keyboard yourself, rather than looking through your code to try to find issues.

By actually using these modes of navigation on your site, you’ll be able to identify several issues before ever even putting your website in front of users.

2. Test your site with a diverse group of users that reflects your market

In addition to testing your website amongst you and your team, making a genuinely user-centred and accessible site necessitates testing with real users.

Especially important is testing with users who require accessibility accommodations and who use these tools on a day to day basis, as well as testing with a diverse population that represents your market.

Some great organizations that focus on accessible and inclusive user testing are Fable Tech Lab’s accessibility user testing and GRIT Toronto’s inclusive user testing. These organizations can help you work with a wide variety of users who interact with websites in different ways and who come from a wide variety of backgrounds.

To get the research insights you need and to design websites that are delightful for all of your potential users, being aware of and testing for these accessibility and usability issues with real assistive technology and live users, is critical to understanding how to make your website as usable and enjoyable as it can be.

Here’s the thing: it’s not hard to do better.

And if you bake it into your process from the beginning, it’s much easier.

Here’s a three step guide to becoming an expert:

1. Start with knowing there’s something wrong by testing the website yourself.

This will make it clear what’s happening and why it sucks, instead of relying on a tool that might not get it or a person who has to explain it to you.

2. Learn more about what’s causing the issue and what you can do to improve it.

To learn more about key tools and requirements like keyboard navigation, landmarks, alt tags, headings, screen readers, and more, check out our web accessibility glossary.

3. Figure out how to fix those issues.

A good reference for that would be the official WCAG accessibility guidelines or you can ask for our help!

Looking for a quick way to get started fixing your website?

Getting all of this right from the start is tough. Knowing there’s something wrong doesn’t necessarily help you in understanding what the specific issue is and what you can do about it. That’s why we launched the Inclusive Website Audit service.

With the audit service, we’ll help you take next steps by identifying the key issues on your website that are impacting usability, accessibility, and inclusivity, including speech and keyboard navigation, and much more.

Learn more about the Inclusive Website Audit service

The post Your website is broken: a look at the accessibility issues you probably forgot to test for appeared first on Say Yeah!.

So you’ve purchased your new website domain and you’re ready to build your site. Or are you? “Just” having a website and domain are not enough to drive visits, leads, or sales. There are other components in the digital lifecycle that must be considered.

The internet has made starting a business possible for everyone. And every day new entrepreneurs decide to take the leap and go into business, publishing a website that acts as their virtual headquarters. But before an entrepreneur invests any capital into designing a website, there must first be a clear understanding of what a website is and what purpose that website serves.

Understanding Website Fundamentals

Not everyone who starts a business online understands what the purpose of their website is. However, every successful business owner or marketing professional can answer that fundamental question— what purpose does my website serve?
Let’s start with the basics to understand why this is so important. At its most basic, a website is an internet-browsable digital property or digital asset that hosts one or more pages of content. It is crucial to understand the website as a collection of content because this content helps search engines and, most importantly, people, first find the website, and then take action.

Fundamentally, content is the lifeblood of any site looking to drive consumer engagement as content both shapes a user’s perception and experience, and encourages them to click. As a result, before designing a web site, the business first needs a clear vision of what content will be required to drive engagement and action.

In order to form a sound content strategy, the business first needs to ask itself the following:

1. Who is the business targeting?

By understanding who your target audience is, you can better determine how to deliver value to them, how you can best engage them with language and visuals, and what you need to offer to drive engagement and clicks.

You do this by providing an:

Offer: Understand what you have to offer your target (be able to clearly state what your product or service does).

Promise: Promise your target something of value to them (“more this” “better that”).

2. What does the business need to achieve?

Understanding your business goals allows you to focus your content on driving users towards these goals.

Here are some examples:

Awareness: Does the company want to build awareness? This is perhaps the first crucial step for a new online business. If the product or service is new to an industry it needs to make people aware it exists. The business needs to demonstrate that it offers value to its prospective customers.

Retention: Once a business is established, does the business want to retain its clients to grow loyalty and promote advocacy?

Profit: Is the goal to increase revenue or decrease cost? A website can have a fundamental impact on the bottom line through the alignment of sales efforts and marketing initiatives, along with the optimization of conversion funnels and other calls to action (CTAs), all of which shape the content of your website.

3. How does my website fit into my existing business model?

The content and function of the site will rely heavily on what other channels the business operates in. For example, there will be differences based on whether the business operates primarily online or at physical locations. Perhaps the business is selling a product or service, perhaps it’s an information or news source, and perhaps it drives people to download an app or visit a real-world location. Each of these criteria leads to different business goals, different content, and different calls to action.

By answering these questions, a business will gain insight into how they need to tailor the content of the site, ultimately leading to a relevant and engaging user experience for visitors who reach a specific website landing page.

Starting the machine and getting momentum

With the strategic foundation set by answering the questions above, you’re now ready to start shaping the content of your website. The first priority now is to consider the homepage and any other landing pages which may act as a user’s first click into your site. How will you capture those users on each landing page? Given this entry point and the channel that brought the user to that page, what information and CTA needs to be on each landing page to drive engagement?

You’ll find a framework for answering just these questions (along with a number of homepage and landing page examples) in our free Effective Landing Pages book.

Now that you’re ready to take the first steps with your website, download Effective Landing Pages and ensure you have the foundation to continually attract and grow your customer base.

Product strategy as a foundational skill

If you’re looking to bring fundamental product strategy methodologies and execution to your team, we’re here to help.

Get in touch

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As an avid Adobe Illustrator user for the past 15 years, I think it’s safe to say that I love the vector format. That’s why I’m excited SVG is gaining traction.

The good

The many benefits of SVG:

• Scale without quality loss
• Smaller file sizes
• Is simply an XML file; you can open an SVG in a text editor and edit the code.
• Can be styled with CSS; colours can be changed, elements hidden, allowing a single image to be used for multiple purposes.
• Animation

The bad

Nothing’s perfect, and browser support for SVG is no exception;

• Quirky behaviour in some modern browsers
• Old browsers lack support (IE prior to version 9, Android prior to version 4)
• The way you load an image affects whether or not it can be styled with external stylesheets
• It can be tricky to wrap your head around the way viewBox works

The resources

If you’re interested in the SVG format, below are some great resources to help you get started.

CSS-Tricks – Using SVG

A great place to start, with overviews of browser support, CSS integration, and the various methods of loading SVG on your site.

Can I Use – SVG Browser Support

Helpful table indicating browser support for SVG

StackOverflow – Optimal Settings for Illustrator Export

The title says it all, a short guide to exporting SVG from Illustrator.

Making Sense of SVG viewBox’s Madness

Helpful examples that explain how and why viewBox works the way it does.

Snap SVG

An Adobe backed SVG Javascript framework for loading and animating SVG in modern browsers. Be sure to check out their demos.

Raphael

SnapSVG’s older brother. Written by the same developer, Dmitry Baranovskiy, Raphael is a little heftier in the codebase than Snap, but includes support for older browsers.

Iconic

An extensive collection of standard interface icons in browser ready SVG format.

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Peer review is the cornerstone of scientific research, but it’s not glamorous work. Research to ensure studies are non-biased, valid, and replicable is a vital aspect of scientific research that is often overlooked.

As reported by The Economist:

“Last year researchers at one biotech firm, Amgen, found they could reproduce just six of 53 “landmark” studies in cancer research.”

Curate Science aims to increase exposure for replication studies based off published research, promising to become the go-to source for journalists and researchers alike to find verifiable scientific knowledge.

Our work with Curate Science covers the gamut of discovering scientific research, detailing published findings, methods, and replications, as well as supporting community feedback and verification across the entirety of this trove of scientific knowledge.

The post NEW WORK: Curate Science, the best in peer-reviewed science appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Last week, Pinterest and Shopify introduced Rich Pins for Shopify stores.

In the example above you can see that pins from a Shopify store now automatically include stock and pricing information. Whether on desktop or mobile, this information remains available and up to date across Pinterest with this integration whenever your image is repinned.

If you’d like to talk more about e-commerce and Shopify, get in touch.

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Let us know your thoughts on Twitter @sayyeahto.

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Our new website may look like an exercise in flamboyant, textured, digital design—exactly what Apple is moving away from with iOS 7—but there’s no digital trickery here. We made and photographed every element of the site, just adding a little digital text to tell our story. And this video shows how we did it.

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