the case for accessible web design
In a few words: it's a legal requirement; it's the right thing to do; it can open up your website to an additional 10 million customers in the UK alone or 650 million worldwide; it can greatly improve your search engine ranking; it makes your site easier to use for everyone.
In rather more words: while the moral case for opening up the internet to as many people as possible is unlikely to meet with much resistance, webmasters and those who control web spending tend to require more compelling persuasion. For these groups there are two further considerations: legal compulsion and commercial sense.
the legal case
Websites are specifically mentioned in the Disability Discrimination Act (1995) and in the Code of Practice relating to this act (2002). The provisions of this act state that service providers must make reasonable adjustments to ensure that it is not "impossible or unreasonably difficult" for disabled people to access their services.
the business case
More compelling still are the statistics on the number of users potentially alienated by websites with accessibility issues: there are more than 10 million registered disabled people in the UK alone. Included in that figure are 2m blind or partially sighted users, 700k severely or profoundly deaf, 3.4m with physical disabilities and 1.5m with learning difficulties. Simply not to cater for these groups is equivalent to turning away 1 in 6 of your customers at the door.
For websites that rely on search engines to deliver them traffic, there is even more reason to design your website to accessibility standards: your number one deaf/blind customers. The "robots" used by Google and Yahoo to crawl through your site can't see your pretty pictures, your videos or your Flash animations; they can't hear your sounds; they see nothing but the textual markup that forms the structure of your web page. And the better they can read that, the better your search engine ranking. The better your search engine ranking, the more visitors your site will have.
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web accessibility issues
blind and partially sighted users
Catering for the blind is perhaps the most obvious duty of the accessible web designer. It's also one of the least challenging for any web designer who adheres to the standards laid down by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). By separating structure from style and by organising the page in a logical manner, which any good web designer should be doing as a matter of course anyway, half the job is already done. There are however some additional challenges, including catering for users with other visual impairments. We discuss these here: web accessibility considerations for blind and partially sighted visitors.
deaf users and the hard of hearing
The internet is largely thought of as a visual medium and - in large part - it is. However, the proliferation of online video and sound has given little regard to the needs of the deaf and the hard of hearing. Whenever you convey information on your website by use of sound, you should also convey that information visually, otherwise you are making it "impossible or unreasonably difficult" for disabled users to receive the same service as your hearing visitors. We discuss this in greater length here: issues faced by deaf users on the internet.
users with physical disabilities
Interacting with a website without using the mouse can be a difficult task. You can easily see this for yourself: use the Tab key to move from link to link, the space bar for toggling checkboxes and radio buttons and the enter key for activating links. In addition to those with permanent disabilities, users with temporary injuries, visitors using certain browsers and - importantly - users of mobile devices may not be able to navigate with a mouse.
On this site, keyboard navigation should be simple because it's been designed to WCAG accessibility standards, but navigating this way through certain other sites and in particular, trying to fill in forms this way, will gain you valuable insight into the problems of mouseless navigation.
Once again, structuring the site correctly and following W3C standards gets us a large part of the way to achieving accessibility. We can provide further assistance by providing skip links and additional navigational links such as those found at the bottom of each section here.
users with learning difficulties
It may not be obvious how we can help this group: a cognitive or neurological disability is conceptually difficult to mitigate against. But yet again we find that coding to W3C standards and - crucially - providing a clear, coherent, logical structure and a consistent means of navigation helps greatly in the site's usability. This is to the benefit of all. Additionally, we should work to avoid distracting animations, pop-ups and other "surprises" and inconsistencies that can render a site inaccessible to users with certain cognitive limitations.
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what you can do
There are essentially two steps you need to take: evaluate your accessibility needs and remedy any shortcomings. SeeHearSurf by Dreamberry Design can perform these tasks for you.
Call us today on 0845 388 0833 to discuss your requirements or read more about our services.
If you would like to perform your own evaluations before deciding whether to engage our services, we suggest you consult the following resources (caveat: because of the variety of human factors involved, no electronic test can provide a full certification of accessibility, however they provide a good indication of whether you're on the right track):
- Check your site HTML is valid - if your site fails this check it's fallen at the first hurdle
- Consult the W3C's guide to web accessibility evaluation tools
- Read more about accessibility issues at the following sites - Accessites ; Accessify Forum ; Ability Net ; the Guild of Accessible Web Designers (of which we are a member) ; the RNIB.
If after all your investigations you still have cause for concern, then please contact us to discuss your requirements on 0845 388 0833 or read more about our services.