Your website should be considered a public place where everyone needs and level of functionality are to be provided.
Universal design (UU) is a concept that is too many associated with how buildings and public spaces are designed to meet all human needs regardless of the functional level.
The same requirements are now increasingly required for web pages; from 2014, all new web pages launched had to comply with universal design requirements, and by 2021 this applies to all existing web pages.
It doesn't matter if you're a public establishment or a online store.
As most websites can also be considered public places, it makes sense that they meet the same requirements as libraries, concert halls and blocks of housing – it is about making themselves available to all parts of the target group.
What does universal design mean for SEO?
It is not like the search engines either cancel or approve your website against the UU criteria, and then rank you better or worse as a consequence of this.
The truth is as simple as that most of the criteria required for a website to be considered universally designed are the same criteria as those required for the SEO to be considered error-free.
You will not get far with a flawless SEO alone, as this can be considered a hygiene factor that should be “checked by” before you can focus on the more important and far more exciting tasks of SEO; user experience, content, information architecture, value projection, etc.
What do you have to do on the page to make it universally designed?
Depending on how far your website is following the UU standard per day, it often requires a considerable amount of work for the web developers and other stakeholders to get you to target. Many will still find that a makeover to satisfy UU requirements will ultimately benefit the entire page; design, architecture and user experience.
Some universal design requirements
- Alt texts for all images, with information about what the picture contains
- The title of pages shall be the first heading of the page and shall be encoded with <h1>
- Links must be marked with more than just color, for example with underscores