NGL, I was a little overwhelmed when I sat down to write this article. There are so many things that immediately flooded my mind—take out any extra divs; use links for URLs, use buttons for events and actions; use semantic HTML instead of divs everywhere; use variable fonts… the list went on and on. But, I finally settled on a single, practical thing that people can do to make their website better:
Increase your reach.
Increase the reach of your website by making it more usable for a wider audience of people. Yes, I’m talking about accessibility. But I bet you already guessed that. After all, I tend to speak about accessibility quite a bit, and tweet about accessibility even more than that, and sometimes even make handy examples on CodePen to provide practical examples.
However, when I’m talking about reach, I am not just talking about people who are blind and rely on assistive technology—such as screen readers—to do their banking or pay their utility bills. I’m not just talking about people who are deaf who need captions on videos. I’m not just talking about people who are colorblind, who need color contrast so they can see what is on the page. Sure, this is where our minds automatically go when we think about accessibility, but I want us to think beyond that.
