Driving traffic to your site and making sales is a constant battle. You need all the help you can get! One way to gain some viewership over your competition is to use an accessibility overlay on your website. A page like this allows people with visual impairments or difficulty reading, such as those using screen readers, to be able to use your website just fine. The advantage of doing this is that it will drive more users towards your site and increase your conversions. More customers mean more sales for you!

It will help you rank higher on Google for keywords related to the overlay. Let’s look at some of the most important things about accessibility overlays. It’s important that you cover all bases here because there are users with disabilities out there who need these services, whether they know it or not.

The page must be accessible with a keyboard. Some users need to use a keyboard to navigate around websites, so it’s important that your overlay is designed in such a way where it’s fully functional with one.

The overlay should have large clickable areas. When an accessibility overlay is displayed on top of a website, the user needs to be able to easily press submit or OK without having to fumble around for the link they want. This is especially true if you’re making this for phones and tablets because some screens can be very small and hard to press links on! Your buttons should be about 50+ px wide, at least.

Contrast! Being able to read text on a website is pretty crucial if you’re going to be displaying a form of some sort. Make sure the text you use has good contrast with the background it’s on, or you might lose out on having people actually read what is there!

Skip navigation links. This isn’t really an accessibility thing, but I’ve seen many sites neglect this, and it’s a massive pain for users who have difficulty navigating around your website. If they can’t find any way to navigate through your site, what good is it then? You’ll just have unhappy customers!

Try not to fill up too much space with your overlay. Accessibility overlays are supposed to help users read the content of your site, not block it out completely! The whole point is to give them a quick version of what you’re trying to say so they know whether or not they should bother reading more. Keep the overlay to a minimum!

Don’t forget that all of your content should be available in the plugin. Some plugins only give you very basic words and sentences to work with, but if people can’t read them, they might not click it in the first place. Make sure to add alt tags and headings and such so text is actually understandable.

Submit buttons should be clear and descriptive. The word “submit” isn’t very descriptive or useful for people who can’t read your overlay, so make sure to use something like “download now!” that describes what will happen when they hit it. Also, remember that not everyone knows what a download is! An explanation of the words might be necessary.