As it comes "out of the box" as it were, a new Zendesk site is not very accessible to people who use assistive technology to browse the web. These include blind or low-vision users, people with dyslexia or other disabilities, and people who are better at listening than at reading.
Here are a few things that can be done to improve a Zendesk site's accessibility for use with screen-reading technology:
- De-clutter, making useful information immediately available at the "top" of the page, the first thing a screen reader reads.
- In particular, use CSS customizations to minimize the less-useful things that appear before the main content of a given page. (See the attached file, "CSS to hide header info.txt", to add as a "Global CSS Widget" that will hide some items in the current Zendesk setup.)
- Make sure anything you remove from the top of the page is still available somewhere further down the page, e.g. in a widget.
- Include a link, if you can figure out how, to "jump to main content".
- Use headings and lists to simplify in-page navigation.
- Label everything clearly with text. This goes especially for any text-entry locations, such as search bars.
- Remove anything unlabelled text-entry boxes, replacing them with well-labelled search widgets (which appear at the "bottom" of the page, after the main content, for screen readers).
- Test your support website using at least one, but preferably several, of the more popular screen readers, including NVDA for Windows, JAWS for Windows (rather expensive, but , VoiceOver for OS X (included in OS X for Macs),
- Test your support website *with a screen reader*, using at least Firefox for Windows and Mac, IE for Windows, and Safari for Mac. Linux users should ideally also be supported (as well as less-popular browsers such as Chrome, Opera, and Konqueror), but if your site design is good enough for Mac and Windows, then Linux users will likely be able to figure it out.
- Make your telephone number and email address easy to find.
- Put extraneous or additional (but less centrally important) information "lower" on the page, or off to the side in widgets (which show up after the main content, for screen readers), so people can still find it, but don't get hit with it right away when they're looking for something else.
- Include further explanation as secondary information within a given heading. This is so it's not the first thing a user notices when reading a page, but it's still there, available to them.
- Change image names to reflect what they depict, prior to uploading them, because Zendesk uses the image name as its tag. (Look up "alt tag" or "title tag" for more info.)
If you have additional ideas, please add them in the comments, or link to your own suggestions on customizing Zendesk sites for non-"sight-dependent" use.
Have fun!