ADA, WCAG, Section 508 Accessibility and hidden text
-
I am working on fixing accessibility issues on client's site, and they have contracted with a vendor who provides both tools to monitor the site and consulting to help us fix issues that are found.
When there are spatial relationships between elements on a page that would be not be evident to someone listening via a screen reader, a strategy that they recommended to us to is to add text helpers that are not visible, but still read by the screen readers.
An example:
Directions to our Fifth Avenue Store
I have seen this technique used on a major brand site but I am concerned that their brand strength insulates them from a hidden text penalty far more than my client's brand would. Also, their implementation uses class names like "ada_hidden" which may help search engines understand the intent, or may not at all.
I am looking for opinions regarding the use of this technique. Normally I wouldn't use it for risk of penalty, but here the intent is to improve the user experience of the pages.
Anyone used similar techniques for ADA/WCAG, or solved the problem in a more SEO-friendly way?
Thanks,
Will
-
Wow, interesting question. I am with you I would definitely worry about obfuscated text penalties (keyword stuffing) employing that particular method. I have no experience with these guidelines but I am interested in what others have to say about the matter.
My initial though would be something like
Directions
Under the assumption that a speech reader would read alt text since users wouldn't see the image. And of course the image could be something completely simple like an arrow or bullet point.
I will wait to see what others may say,
Good luck,
Don
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Subdomain as News Section instead of Source in Google News?
Hi, trying to dig into Google News for a large site, mostly containing news.
Technical SEO | | m.m
The structure of the site network is subdomain.domain.se, and each subdomain has it's own brand with it's own news: x.domain.se
y.domain.se
z.domain.se
etc... Each brand/subdomain is more or less to equate with its own subjectfield/section. In Google News every subdomain is configured with it's own Site Source url, but also having the set up with one section with the same url. It seems like they're getting conflicts in Google News, Google can't always figure out which news article to which brand. Example: an article owned by brand A, but it is sometimes happens that articles getting labeled as brand B in the news SERP, though the link takes you correctly to brand A. I am thinking that this config in News Publisher Center may be a problem? Anyone having any thoughts if that would be better if we delete all source urls except for domain.se-brand and then put all the other subdomains as sections? www.domain.se x.domain.se y.doamin.se z.domain.se Any smart thoughts on this one? Or anything else that could make this wrong labeling (all content included images are hosted in same domain for example). Regards,
Magnus0 -
Is "commented out" text still read by the SEs?
A site I reviewed was showing up in Google rankings for key phrases specific to a city, however the page that was showing up had the 'city' key phrases commented out. Does Google still read and utilized commented out text? Or is it more likely that the page in question got indexed before the key phrases were commented out and it's just still appearing for the related search queries?
Technical SEO | | MLTGroup1 -
How to properly do reviews with Rich Text Snippets
I am trying to find out the best way to do this. Do you use hreview? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | netviper0 -
Do You Have To Have Access to Website Code to Use Open Graph
I am not a website programmer and all of our websites are in Wordpress. I never change the coding on the backend. Is this a necessity if one wants to use Open Graph?
Technical SEO | | dahnyogaworks0 -
Why is either Rogerbot or (if it is the case) Googlebots not recognizing keyword usage in my body text?
I have a client that does liposuction as one of their main services, they have been ranked in the top 1-5 for their keywords "sarasota liposuction" with different variations of the words for a long time, and suddenly have dropped about 10-12 places down to #15 in the engine. I went to investigate this and actually came to the "on-page analysis" tool for SEOmoz pro, where oddly enough it says that there is no mention of the target keyword in the body content (on-page analysis tool screenshot attached). I didn't quite understand why it would not recognize the obvious keywords in the body text so I went back to the page and inspected further. The keywords have an odd featured link that links up to an internally hosted keyword glossary for definitions of terms that people might not know directly. These definitions pop up in a lightbox upon clicking the keyword (liposuction lightbox screenshots attached). I have no idea why google would not recognize these words as they have the text in between the link, yet if there is something wrong with the code syntax etc. it might possibly hender the engine from seeing the body text of the link? any help would be greatly appreciated! Thank you so much! Phn2m Phn2m.png bWr5K.png V36CL.png
Technical SEO | | jbster130 -
Same image file with different alt text?
I have an image that represents 'widgets'. The image works for more than one kind of widget. I have two pages, one optimized for 'blue widgets' and one optimized for 'red widgets'. I would like to use the same 'widgets' image on both pages but change the alt text to be 'blue widgets' or 'red widgets' depending on the page it is used on. Should I: (1) use the same image on different pages with different alt text. (2) duplicate the image file and have two copies 'red_widgets.jpg' and 'blue_widgets.jpg' and then use each copy on the page optimized for the corresponding phrase. (3) create distinct, unique image files (where the pixels are different, not just the file names) for each kind of widget. This is a simplified example of a larger SEO problem where I have 1 image that can be useful on 20 pages that are each optimized for 20 different phrases. Should I use the same image with 20 different alt tags, or create 20 identical (but renamed) copies of the image, or create 20 slightly different image files (with different pixels in each image)? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | scanlin0 -
Can leaving up old web pages no longer accessible through my site navigation hurt my rankings?
My firm recently overhauled a client's website. As part of the project, we gave the content a new structure, eliminating certain pages and creating several new ones. However, I just found out that some of the "old" pages (the ones we supposedly eliminated) still appear in the Google SERPs. Somehow, the client - who handled the coding - let these pages remain live even though they can no longer be accessed through the site navigation. This seems like something that could hurt the client's SEO rankings, but I want to make sure before contacting the client and suggesting they take down the old pages. Can anyone confirm my suspicion?
Technical SEO | | matt-145670 -
If two links from one page link to another, how can I get the second link's anchor text to count?
I am working on an e-commerce site and on the category pages each of the product listings link to the product page twice. The first is an image link and then the second is the product name. I want to get the anchor text of the second link to count. If I no-follow the image link will that help at all? If not is there a way to do this?
Technical SEO | | JordanJudson0