9-Mar-20 | News

Accessibility Dont’s, Learn From Basic Mistakes in Web Design

animated picture of a monitor with web accessibility written on it

Make your next project a little bit more inclusive and usable by not removing or changing some default browser behaviour.

  • Don’t Remove the Underlines on the Links

The goal of the link underline – besides that, it is a universal convention – is to give more visual differences besides just the colour. If we only use colour to convey meaningful information, we exclude our users with colour blindness (or, in some cases, low vision problems). You can remove the underline if it is self-evident that the element is a link like in a navigation section.

  • Don’t Remove the Outline From Focusable Elements

The outline is mostly useful when we navigate with the keyboard, and the browsers respect this by default settings. If we click on a link using a mouse, we can’t see an outline, but using the tab key, we will.

  • Don’t Remove Textarea Resize Functionality

If you have to remove, create an alternative solution like resize the field when the user hits enter. Remove just the horizontal axis and give the freedom to adjust the height.

  • Don’t Open New Browser Windows

The main problem with the target=”_blank” opening is that some users will have trouble to navigate back, and we will confuse a lot of them (why a new window opened recently?). There are situations where we have to open a new window. Usually, when the user has pending work on that page, like filling a form and want to read your privacy policy (which is on a different URL). If we have to use it, the best thing we can do is to notify the user in advance (with text or icon).

Read more about Do’s and Dont’s from the original source