Building a website that’s truly client-first starts with designing for the people who need it most. You can’t just throw the accessibility plug-in on your site and call it a day; a great website is designed for everyone from the ground up.
Knowing your audience is paramount for law firm digital marketing. For personal injury lawyers, this means web accessibility is especially important. Your potential clients may be navigating new physical, cognitive, or motor skill challenges due to their injuries. They could be learning to use assistive technologies like a screen reader or simply dealing with the mental fatigue and stress that comes after a traumatic event and subsequent medical, insurance and legal processes.
An accessible, easy-to-use website makes this process simpler and faster for prospective clients, providing a much-needed positive experience during a difficult time. Your website sets the tone for the entire attorney-client relationship, and making your website accessible is a critical step in building trust and demonstrating your commitment to the client’s well-being.
When done well, accessibility intersects with good design and law firm SEO. Used in tandem with some extra considerations we cover below to help make your website more inviting to everyone, an accessible website shows that your firm cares and is attentive and supportive from the very first interaction. Otherwise, you risk alienating your core audience.
How Good Design and Accessibility Intersect
- Clear, spacious design helps clients with motor impairments or vision issues click on their intended target on the page.
- Great typography makes things more readable for everyone. Start with a clean, well-designed font, and give it appropriate line spacing and letter spacing to make longer paragraphs comfortable to read.
- Link contrast. Just a color change isn’t enough. Use an underline or bold text on links so colorblind users can see them.
- Good button practice. Follow button guidelines for spacing between buttons and their size. The active area needs to be the entire button, not just the text or icon.
- Color contrast and readable fonts ensure legibility for those with low vision or color blindness. Many websites default to using their “accent” color, but make sure it contrasts with the background. It’s common to need to adjust text colors for different backgrounds.
- Responsive design means more than desktop and mobile. A truly responsive website will allow users to adjust the font size to their comfort level without hiding important elements or making the site unreadable.
- Plain language and structured content help people dealing with cognitive fatigue or brain injuries. Take extra time to format your content:
- Break it up into shorter paragraphs
- Use bullet points
- Bold important phrases
Where Accessibility and SEO Meet
- Using descriptive link text helps screen readers and improves keyword relevance. Use “Download our injury checklist” instead of “Click here.”
- Meaningful alt text and/or file names on images give visually impaired users context—and help search engines understand your content.
- Structured HTML and headings (like using <h1> to <h3> in logical order) make your site easier to navigate and easier to index.
- Clear, consistent navigation with proper HTML structure benefits both users with cognitive impairments and search engine crawlers.
- Accessibility scores affect your Core Web Vitals, which Google uses to rank your site.
Common Blunders to Avoid:
- Autoplaying videos and loud sounds can disorient or startle users with PTSD, brain injuries, or sound sensitivity.
- Invasive pop-ups that interrupt navigation, especially for those using assistive technology. Pop-ups should be minimized and balanced carefully with conversion, and should always have a clear exit button that meets size requirements and doesn’t disappear when the window size changes.
- Unusable or bugged forms. When a form is usable for everyone, more potential clients complete it, some because it’s easier, others because it actually allows them to. A well-designed form uses proper HTML structures to make it possible to navigate when using assistive tech.
- Visceral and triggering stock images. People who have suffered an injury have fresh psychological wounds. Showing images of angry dogs with open mouths, or blood on pavement, can cause serious harm to a person to a person who has suffered an injury. Cheesy, overacted stock images could be perceived as insensitive to their pain. Use tact when selecting stock images, or use icons instead.
Using AI for Alt Tags?
At first glance, using AI to generate alt tags for images may seem like a great idea. Adding alt tags with keywords that may boost your SEO, improve your accessibility score on CWV, and help blind and low-vision users hear what’s on the page seems like a win-win-win, right?
Well, it’s complicated.
Alt tags are meant to help contextualize content on a screen, so they should only briefly describe the aspects of the image that are contextually relevant to the content on the page the image appears on. Since AI lacks or ignores context, the literal, in-depth descriptions like the ones AI tends to generate are often unhelpful, adding unnecessary noise that doesn’t help users understand the content on your page.
For example, Chat GPT describes this image as: “Two businessmen in suits sitting at a desk in an office, reviewing a document together. One man, wearing glasses, is holding the paper and gesturing while explaining, while the other listens attentively, holding a pen near his chin. A laptop and notebook are on the table.”
A better alt tag might be: “John Law and Mike Legal collaborating on a case.”
In some cases, an AI image reader can provide a helpful starting point, but human judgment is necessary to meet the needs of users and search engines.
Building for Accessibility Helps Everyone
Accessibility helps everyone, not just those with disabilities. The ramps that allow wheelchair users to get around also help strollers and dollies roll to their destination.
It is a strong trust signal that shows that your business/firm is attentive, professional, and empathetic to everyone. Luckily, if you have a well-designed website that’s built with SEO in mind, you’re probably already most of the way there.
This is a constantly evolving conversation, with different ideas from people with vastly different needs. We’ve outlined a few basic principles, but no blog post could contain the depth of this important topic. It can be overwhelming to take this all on yourself, and many agencies don’t think much beyond minimum requirements.
W3 has a wealth of resources if you want to explore designing and developing for accessibility on your own. But if you’re looking for expert guidance and a faster path forward, our law firm digital marketing experts can help. We’ll not only assess your website’s accessibility, we’ll show you how to turn it into a competitive advantage that elevates your brand beyond the standards.
Special thanks to the users of r/accessibility who provided their thoughts and lived experiences.