Ensure your projects meet accessibility standards with these important rules focusing on WCAG compliance and color contrast, essential for creating inclusive digital experiences.
The internet has become a part of daily life, but not everyone uses it in the same way. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are a set of formal standards aimed to address this problem.
Accessibility isn't just about compliance - it's about improving the usability of your product for everyone. Whilst essential for people with permanent sensory, motor, or cognitive impairments, it also improves the experience for users with temporary or situational limitations.
WCAG criterion 1.4.3: Contrast (Level AA) recommends text, images of text, and graphics (e.g. icons) have a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1. Always check your colors and make your content readable regardless of a user’s ability or circumstance.
Poorly formatted text can make otherwise great content difficult to read. Long lines, tight spacing, and justified text often create barriers for people with cognitive disabilities, dyslexia, or low vision. Even users without disabilities may struggle with dense blocks of text that are visually hard to scan.
Following the WCAG 2.1 Visual Presentation recommendations ensures that text remains readable and adaptable to user preferences.
Using mailto: links is a quick way to add contact functionality to a website, but in most cases it creates more problems than it solves - for both users and developers. Clicking a "Contact Us" link should connect a user with your team - not strand them in an unconfigured email client. Yet mailto: links do exactly that for the majority of users, and the problem goes beyond bad UX. They expose email addresses to spam harvesters, break analytics and create false confidence that contact attempts are being tracked.