“Holistic accessibility … provide[s] people with disabilities the best chance to achieve equality.” — Sheri Byrne-Haber
As digital technology advances, video is gaining popularity across industries, replete with entertaining, engaging, and coherent content. All too often, however, not everyone can access it for various reasons.
Cloudinary’s Product Gallery widget, which launched in 2019, has enabled many brands to effectively and efficiently showcase their products in a sleek and captivating manner, saving countless hours of development time and accelerating release cycles. By adding Cloudinary’s Product Gallery widget with its customizable UI to their product page, retailers reap numerous benefits, often turning visitors into customers in short order.
Part 1 of this series highlights the basics of user-generated content (UGC) and its benefits for e-commerce. Part 2 describes how to leverage UGC images in e-commerce and efficiently upload, transform, and deliver them with Cloudinary. In part 3 we will address videos in UGC and the many related management capabilities offered by Cloudinary.
“For those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green.” (Ted Lowe)
We often laugh about snooker (think billiards if you’ve never heard of snooker) commentaries back in the days of black and white television, but for approximately 300 million people worldwide, the seemingly simple task of distinguishing colors is a daily challenge. Color blindness, or Color Vision Deficiency (CVD), affects roughly one in twelve men, and one in two hundred women. That's over 8% of the population - a significant percentage of your potential customers who may be missing vital information or unable to engage fully with your site. Couple that with increasing legislation promoting accessibility and it's easy to see why you should care about color.
With Cloudinary’s current client-side SDKs, such as React, Vue, and Angular, you can manage images in numerous amazing ways, for example, making use of media from Cloudinary for your project, transforming media, and enhancing the responsiveness of your site. A new and exciting feature in our Angular SDK, called the Advanced Image component, takes image management to the next level by handling many common front-end (FE) tasks, such as lazy loading, placeholding, accessibility, and, coming soon, zooming. Just ask the component to perform any of those tasks by adding the appropriate attributes and it’ll do the rest.
Using alternative text (alt text) in HTML has long been a common SEO best practice, which also works well for accessibility. This post shows you how to programmatically generate, save, and use alt text for your images on Cloudinary.
Web accessibility (a11y) is about gaining an insight into—
It’s a blurry line between accessibility and usability (or user experience) and one might argue that they are actually the same thing. Nonetheless, if your audience can't use your app with ease and confidence, then it’s not accessible enough and the user experience is not good enough.
Images and videos are critical for ensuring user engagement on the web. For instance, on a retail website, images of a product from different angles or a 360-degree video of the product can lead to higher conversion rates. For a news website, users are more likely to read articles with visual media accompanying the content. It has been reported that posts that include images produce a 650-percent higher user-engagement rate than text-only posts.