Accessibility: Checklist for Improving Your Site's Accessibility
5 min read
When building your site with Wix, it is important to take accessibility into account. This ensures that all visitors, regardless of ability, can access and enjoy your site's content.
We recommend manually checking your site with the below checklist to make sure your visitors have a smooth, easy experience.
Tip:
The best way to ensure accessibility on your site is with the Accessibility Wizard, which scans your site, and provides actionable solutions to improve your site's accessibility. Try out the Accessibility Wizard to get started.
In this article, learn more about:
Understanding accessibility
Website accessibility refers to the practice of formatting your site to ensure everyone, able-bodied or disabled, can equally access, navigate and interact with your site's content.
You may have some visitors who require different accommodations in order to navigate or use your site, such as:
- Visual accommodations: People who experience low vision or loss of vision may rely on assistive technologies (like screen readers) or visual formatting (like increased text size, higher color contrasts, etc.) to successfully navigate through your site.
- Limited motor-function accommodations: People whose motor function range limits the use of a mouse or touchpad, may instead use a keyboard coupled with visual indicators to navigate through a site.
- Auditory accommodations: People who experience any degree of hearing loss may rely on the availability of audio captions or transcripts on your site.
- Cognitive accommodations: People affected by learning or cognitive disabilities (dyslexia, ADHD, autism, etc.) rely on content structure and layout consistency to navigate successfully through your site.
- Neurological accommodations: People with sensory sensitivities (such as seizure disorders) may rely on reduced motion of animated elements, or may benefit from the option to control what triggers a movement or an animation.
- Speech accommodations: People who are affected by speech disabilities may require alternate contact methods, such as providing contact forms, chat, or email options, rather than just providing a phone number.
It is therefore good web practice to ensure that all of your visitors can navigate and enjoy your site equally.
Building an accessible Wix site
You can build a new site from scratch by beginning with one of our accessible templates.
These templates have basic built-in accessibility features, such as accessible heading structures and color contrast.
Once you've selected your template, and added your desired content to it, you can review the checklist below and complete any required action items.
Note:
Some advanced accessibility features, such as custom ARIA labels and alt text, are not included in these templates and need to be added manually.
Accessibility checklist
While Wix takes care of many of the back-end accessibility features / configurations your site needs, such as: keyboard semantics, defining ARIA attributes for elements we provide, offering visual indicators, etc., it is also necessary to make the content you add to your site accessible.
Accessibility requirements can differ from region to region, but we have created a checklist of universal steps that cover the basics for every region.
To learn more about creating an accessible website that is also compliant with the laws in your region, please see Accessibility: Compliance with Your Regional Laws.
Follow our recommendations below to help you improve your site's accessibility:
Important note about compliance:
- At Wix, we are committed to ensuring everyone, regardless of ability, can use our products and services. We are continually working on improving them, in line with accessibility standards.
- Wix.com cannot guarantee or ensure that the use of our services is compliant with all accessibility laws and worldwide regulations.
- You are responsible for reviewing and complying with local legislation applicable to you or to your site visitors.
Want to know more?
Check out our Accessibility 101 course on Wix Learn.