Visual Accessibility Guidelines and Best Practices

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Visual Accessibility Guidelines and Best Practices

Posted December 10, 2024

AudioEye

Posted December 10, 2024

Stylized screen with various colored and non-colored design elements. A color swatch is in the bottom right-hand corner and an icon of a pen's tip is in the top left-hand corner.
Stylized screen with various colored and non-colored design elements. A color swatch is in the bottom right-hand corner and an icon of a pen's tip is in the top left-hand corner.

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If your digital content isn’t optimized for visual accessibility, you’re excluding a significant audience and increasing your legal risk. Below, we’ll discuss how to optimize your digital content for those with visual disabilities and meet accessibility compliance requirements.

Think about how much time, effort, and resources you spend creating a perfect piece of digital content for your business — whether it’s a new web page or a mobile app. Now imagine that millions of people can’t see that content the way you intended. Wasteful, right?

For the 2.2 billion people worldwide who have a vision impairment, that’s exactly what’s happening if you haven’t addressed — or even checked — your content for visual barriers. Without addressing these issues in your website, ads, social media, or mobile app content, you’re excluding a huge percentage of users worldwide from interacting with your content. Plus, it could be putting your organization at legal risk.


Below, we’ll cover how to optimize your digital content for individuals with visual impairments to not only create a more accessible experience but lower your legal risk as well.

What is Visual Accessibility?

Visual accessibility refers to designing digital content or other online experiences in a way that ensures individuals with visual impairments — including blindness, low vision, or color blindness — can access, understand, and interact with them. The approach covers various web elements, such as:

  • Color contrast
  • Font sizes and typography
  • Layout and hierarchy
  • Content structure
  • Graphics
  • Images
  • Videos
  • Forms and documents


It also ensures that each of the elements above are compatible with assistive technologies, such as screen readers.

Web browser with a large accessibility symbol in the middle; a cursor is outlining the symbol.

Visual Accessibility Guidelines and Best Practices

To create digital content that’s accessible to individuals with visual disabilities or impairments, you first need to understand the legal requirements surrounding visual accessibility.

Most countries worldwide have adopted the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as the benchmark for digital accessibility. Developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), WCAG includes specific success criteria to enhance the usability and accessibility of web content. The guidelines are broken down into four principles: 

  • Perceivable: Users can access information through their senses alone, nothing is invisible to any of the five senses.
  • Operable: Users can interact with all content and web elements using various tools, including assistive technology and keyboard commands.
  • Understandable: Content is clear and predictable with users able to easily comprehend and navigate through it.
  • Robust: Robust content is designed to function across diverse technologies, including both current and future assistive tools. 

Each principle is then broken down into testable success criteria organized by three levels of conformance:

  • Level A: The minimum requirements to ensure basic accessibility for people with disabilities.
  • Level AA: Addresses common accessibility issues and is often the legal standard adhered to in most countries
  • Level AAA: The highest level aims to provide an enhanced experience for all users but is not always practical for every situation. 

For visual accessibility, most organizations are required to meet Level AA compliance to comply with accessibility laws, including the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, the European Accessibility Act (EAA), the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA), and other global standards.

With that in mind, let’s break down the best practices for visual accessibility.

Provide Good Color and Contrast

Color and contrast are foundational elements of visual accessibility. Ensuring your text and other important web elements are distinguishable is critical in providing a good experience, particularly for users who are color blind or who have low vision. 


To conform with WCAG guidelines, your text should have a minimum color contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for normal text and 7:1 for larger text (a color contrast checker can help you check contrast ratios). Additionally, avoid using color alone to convey information—supplement the use of color with patterns, labels, or icons to enhance accessibility. You should also choose color palettes that are distinguishable for all users, particularly those with red-green colorblindness, the most common type.

Use an Accessible Font

Font choice plays a huge role in how readable your content is. The right font choices and text formatting ensure your content is accessible to everyone. To be compliant with accessibility laws like the ADA and EAA, you need to ensure your text can be zoomed in by up to 200% without losing functionality. Using accessible fonts (such as Sans-Serif fonts), ensuring line spacing is 1.5x the font size, and avoiding overly decorative fonts can help you improve readability for users, particularly those with low vision.

Have an Intuitive Layout and Clear Visual Hierarchy

Navigating digital content can be challenging for individuals with visual impairments if the information is not set up intuitively or logically. Structuring your content with headings that follow a hierarchical order (e.g., H1, H2, H3) creates a logical flow of information and helps individuals with visual disabilities navigate your content confidently. You should also use ample white space to reduce visual clutter and make scanning content easier.

Provide a Good Content Structure

The structure of your digital content goes beyond just layout to ensure it’s programmatically understandable by assistive technologies like screen readers. Semantic HTML and ARIA landmarks are instrumental in creating a strong content structure for assistive technologies. For example, labeling all your web elements, including buttons and forms, with the right ARIA attributes can help assistive technology users better navigate your site. Additionally, keeping navigation and structure consistent across your entire site further improves usability for individuals with disabilities.

Create Accessible Graphics and Infographics

Any time you have visual data, such as a graphic, infographic, data chart, or visual table, it must be accessible to everyone, including users who rely on screen readers or tactile feedback. Including alt text for each of these elements ensures assistive technology users can interact with these elements and consume the information they contain. Providing a text-based version of any infographic or complex visual data can also improve accessibility.

Include Closed Captions for Audio Content

Similar to visual content, your audio content must also be accessible to individuals with disabilities. Including closed captions or audio descriptions for your video content enables users to interact with content and consume information.

Ensure Forms and Online Documents are Accessible

Accessibility requirements extend to all digital content — including forms and web-delivered documents such as Word documents, PDFs, or spreadsheets. These elements are often critical for user interaction and should be optimized for accessibility. For example, including clear labels, instructions, and error messages for forms can significantly improve the experience for those with visual impairments. 


All online documents should be optimized for accessibility and provide an intuitive, simple navigation experience for assistive technology users. Implementing the accessibility standards mentioned above can help you create accessible online documents.

Ensure Compatibility with Assistive Technologies

Not all users rely on a mouse to navigate digital spaces. Many rely on assistive technologies or keyboard commands to access and use online spaces. Consider testing your website or mobile app using popular screen readers like JAWS or NVDA to ensure all your content follows a logical reading order. You should also test your content using only keyboard commands to ensure your users can tab through content easily. Be sure the focus indicators are clearly visible so users or assistive technologies know exactly where they are on a page.

Stylized web browser with a door open to the accessibility symbol.

Ensure Accessibility for Your Website with AudioEye

For users with visual impairments, the accessibility best practices above create a more accessible and navigable user interface, enabling them to fully participate in online spaces. From providing sufficient contrast and alternative text to using a logical order of headers, these web accessibility best practices make a huge difference for those with visual or other types of disabilities.

With AudioEye, meeting accessibility standards and creating an accessible user experience is simple, easy, and cost effective. We start with a free accessibility scan that highlights common accessibility issues such as missing alt text or insufficient color contrast. Our Automated Accessibility Platform then fixes these issues while our team of experts finds and fixes more complex accessibility issues.

Together, our comprehensive approach to accessibility helps you create a digital environment that is welcoming and usable not just for those with visual disabilities but for all users. 

Ready to get started? Enter the URL of your digital content into our Web Accessibility Checker below. 


Want to see AudioEye in action? Schedule a demo today.

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