Ensuring your website is accessible is imperative for business, legal, and practical reasons. Making your website compliant usually requires guidance from accessibility experts. However, there are tests and checks you can begin yourself to quickly get some idea of how well your website delivers on some of the basics of accessibility.

Start by checking out whether the headings on your website are structured properly. Headings communicate the organization of the content on the page. Web browsers, plug-ins, and assistive technologies can use them to provide in-page navigation.

Alternative text for images also called alt tags or alt descriptions is the written copy that appears in place of an image on a webpage if the image fails to load on a user's screen. This text helps screen-reading tools describe images to visually impaired readers and allows search engines to better crawl and rank your website.

Color contrast is part of a broader set of web standards that fall under the umbrella of accessibility. They're meant to make sure that everyone – including those with visual, motor/mobility, auditory or cognitive impairments, or seizures – are not presented with barriers that prevent interaction with websites.

Typefaces are the foundation of accessible visual reading experiences, so choosing a performant typeface that enhances legibility and readability for people with poor vision, learning disabilities, aphasia, dyslexia or low adult literacy is of paramount importance if you want your written information to be as accessible as possible.

Many people can't or choose not to use a mouse to navigate the web, and instead use a keyboard, keyboard emulator, or other alternative input devices. For this reason, it's essential that every link, control, and feature that can be operated with a mouse is accessible using only a keyboard.

Captions are text alternatives of the audio content, synchronized with the video. They should include spoken dialogue, relevant sounds, and other contextual elements, like music, that may be critical to getting the full intended purpose or feeling of the video. What first comes to mind for many people are the benefits captions have for people who are deaf or have hearing loss, and certainly, they are required for that reason. However, they also have benefits for everyone at different times, likes in a quiet setting or when reading and watching together helps with understanding.

When including links in your content, use text that properly describes where the link will go. Using "click here" is not considered descriptive, and is ineffective for a screen reader user. Just like sighted users scan the page for linked text, visually-impaired users can use their screen readers to scan for links. As a result, screen reader users often do not read the link within the context of the rest of the page. Using descriptive text properly explains the context of links to the screen reader user.

Test your website on mobile. The goal of responsive design is to build web pages that detect the visitor's screen size and orientation and change the layout accordingly. Responsive design allows your website content to flow freely across all screen resolutions and sizes, and renders it to look great on all devices. It also makes it unnecessary to maintain different versions of your website for mobile and desktop and saves you time, resources and efforts.