Why is website accessibility relevant for you?
Accessibility for websites goes beyond fulfilling legal obligations. It means removing obstacles to ensure that everyone, regardless of their physical or cognitive abilities, their age or their previous experience, can access and use your website.
Since the establishment of the German BITV regulation, more and more German organizations are required to follow its web accessibility guidelines. For instance, public entities have been obliged to provide digital accessibility for several years, and many private-sector companies will have to make their websites and apps inclusive beginning in 2025. This applies to most companies in online retail, banking services and hardware system providers.
Don’t wait until 2025. Creating a comprehensive, inclusive website requires a certain amount of extra work and testing, but is worthwhile on several levels and should be implemented as early as possible. After all, designing an accessible website requires revising the structure and often the content as well. Among other benefits, this revision has a positive influence on user experience and can extend the length of time a user stays on the site.
Adapt your website today, and benefit from improved online performance and search engine optimization while remaining one step ahead of your competitors.
BITV – What does it mean?
BITV stands for Barrierefreie Informationstechnik Verordnung, or “Accessible Information Technology Regulation” in English. The BITV has undergone extensive expansion and includes over 92 criteria to test whether a website conforms to accessibility standards. The criteria are based on four pillars:
- Perception
- Usability
- Comprehensibility
- Robustness
What exactly does this mean for your website? Here are the most important points, in brief.
Important website accessibility standards
Enable users to perceive the content of your website quickly and easily by choosing a large enough font size and opting for a strong contrast between the website elements and the background. When choosing colors, avoid those that are more difficult to perceive, for example by individuals with a red-green deficiency.
While it’s often no problem to click the right field with the mouse, left clicks and narrow control panels on a touchscreen can be a real challenge. Keeping elements like links and visuals large-scale ensures a more usable web design.
Including audio texts of images and structural elements not only increases your search engine ranking, it also helps those with limited vision to fully experience your website content. Make sure the audio versions make sense and are complete.
Simple language in the form of short sentences, uncomplicated syntax and commonly used words and phrases is essential if you want your website content to reach all users.
When restructuring your website, think not only about your main content, but also about downloadable materials, such as forms and more. For example, do your forms have all the important “label” elements?
Accessibility for websites – our support
We are the ideal partner for implementing website accessibility standards on your homepage. Benefit from our knowledge as we evaluate your web presence according to the 92 BITV criteria and help you remove any hurdles to accessibility. Our experience in the areas of accessible screen design, suitable technical implementation, target group-oriented content creation and maintenance helps convert your website into an agile, BITV-compliant experience. We are happy to support you with a complete conversion or with individual issues.
