BoxCast takes accessibility seriously, and we are actively investing in making the Sites more accessibility friendly. While we enable you to build accessible sites and are continuously adding features to make it even easier, it is ultimately up to you to ensure your site is accessible, similar to SEO or site performance. Learn more about accessibility at BoxCast below.

Accessibility in terms of a website is a site that can be used by users with auditory, visual, or cognitive disabilities, as well as those who must navigate by voice, screen readers, or other assistive technologies. According to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an organization that provides international web standards, an accessible website must be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust for these users.

Here are some built-in features you can use to create more accessible sites with BoxCast.

Where possible, BoxCast leverages semantic HTML5 elements. This is the best practice for accessibility, as the standards of HTML implement a lot of good UX out of the box for assistive tools. The foundation of BoxCast's accessibility strategy is to rely on the standard HTML functionality. For example, headers use header tags (<h1>). This ensures the best accessibility functionality, as it’s already baked into browsers and supported by screen readers.

Using heading tags helps visitors who use screen readers understand your website and how it's organized. Heading tags (h1, h2, h3, and so on) break the content on a page up into related chunks of information. Keep the following in mind:

Ensure all image elements have an alt tag or attribute. Adding alt text to your images helps visually impaired visitors better understand the context of the photos on your site. When an alt tag is not present on an image, a screen reader may announce the image’s file name or path instead. This fails to communicate the image’s content. For images that include text, ensure the alt description includes the image’s text.

To add alt text to a widget, right-click the widget, and click Edit Content. For example, to add alt text to an image widget, see Image Widget.

Note

Background images do not have a space to enter alt text because the background design is not recorded as content when the page source is scanned or crawled by a search engine.

Not everyone uses a mouse or trackpad to navigate a website. Users without a mouse navigate via keyboard by clicking the tab or arrow keys to move to the next element. You can access functionality with a keyboard.

Pop-ups can be closed using the keyboard.

Not every widget in the Sites platform is 100% friendly to keyboard navigation. For example, any 3rd party tool like a Facebook embed or Map relies on the 3rd party developer to ensure it’s usable via keyboard.

We set the language of the website automatically based on what you’ve set in the site settings. This ensures screen readers can determine the language of the website and assist users in the right language.

BoxCast is actively investing in making the sites developed with our platform more accessibility friendly.

In addition to the above features, BoxCast's partner Duda has two apps to help assist with compliance automation. AudioEye and UserWay can help you automatically generate alt text, correct color contrast, enlarge cursors, create dyslexia-friendly fonts, and more.

For more information on accessibility, consult the following resources: