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LiveChat’s vision is clearly defined. We want to enable “customer communication without barriers.” We knew that we couldn’t just talk the talk — we also needed to walk the walk. And what better way to do that than by making our tool more accessible?
Accessibility means that you design and develop a website so that its content is available to anyone, including people with disabilities. When you comply with accessibility standards, you make it convenient for people with disabilities to perceive, understand, navigate, interact, and contribute to the Web.
We made our Chat Widget more accessible by adding support for assistive technologies like screen readers. Now, they can read messages in the chat out loud. We also adjusted color contrast and keyboard navigation. All these changes help our customers with different types of disabilities interact and make LiveChat more inclusive.
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The right color contrast is crucial for color-blind people. They usually need specific color combinations and larger text sizes in order to fully access the content. If you want your website to be accessible, using a blue font on a black background isn’t the best idea.
Problems with color contrast don’t always result from the software itself. Sometimes, these problems are due to people customizing the color settings in an app. People choose the colors they like, but their preferences often don’t match the recommended contrast ratio. We made our colors compliant with the WCAG principles. You can now set your brand color as the primary one, and we will adjust the rest of the colors used in Chat Widget so that they meet the required contrast ratios.
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Keyboard navigation means being able to access all parts of your website with just a keyboard. Typically, keyboard navigation requires using the tab key combined with the shift key and arrow keys to move from one element of your website to another. After our latest improvements to Chat Widget, your customer support agents can now use LiveChat to chat with your customers and access all the available Chat Widget functions using a keyboard only.
To make keyboard navigation fully functional, you have to take a few considerations into account: make elements accessible by keyboard, set up focus states, and add focus traps. We covered those three elements and more in detail in an article dedicated entirely to keyboard navigation.
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Screen readers are used mainly by visually impaired people. A screen reader is a software application that processes written content on computers and web browsers and transforms it into a voice description.
Depending on the extent of visual disability, people can choose from different types of screen readers. Apart from a typical screen reader, they can also use a braille display or text-to-speech technology.
In some cases, screen readers won’t be able to read every type of content. Those cases include chat bubbles that display information that somebody is typing. While it’s obvious to people without visual disabilities, visually impaired people who use screen readers that don’t meet the accessibility standards will have difficulty accessing similar content.
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With many technicalities underneath the surface, I get that the subject of accessibility might be a tad difficult to grasp at first. If you feel like you could use some more explanation, we’ve got you covered.
On July 20, 12 PM EDT, Marcos and Konrad will walk you through all aspects of accessibility, tell you why it’s important and how an accessible chat widget can benefit your customers. Join our event on LinkedIn and prepare a list of questions for our guys.
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