Neat Redesign

Website accessibility is generally considered something obscure, distant and unimportant to spend your time on. Apart from being a legal requirement in the US, UK and Europe (will be soon), accessible websites have quite a number of advantages in terms of business performance.

First of all, accessible websites are made accessible to people without or with bad eyesight. Apart from people, this includes the search engines, because they don’t appreciate the visual layouts as well.

Let’s see what can be done to improve website accessibility:
- provide text alternative for any media (images, auto, video)
- alt and title attributes are added, describing images and links
- some image links are replaced with text links with the proper anchor text
- use simple language that your visitors can understand

As the main point of accessibility is translating any means of presenting information to text and using the appropriate language (relevant words), it makes the site extremely valuable in the eyes of the search engines, as search engines need text (mostly).

Here is what may result in with increased website accessibility:
- visually or otherwise impaired visitors may actually do business with you via the Internet, which increases your customer base
- search engines rank your site higher, which drives additional traffic, which, in turn, prompts sales

Either way, accessibility will get you the extra push to gain more happy customers.

Of course, accessibility makes the site usable not only for visually impaired visitors and the search engines, but to the seeing humans as well. They will be able to understand what your site is about easier (even with images turned off) and will be more likely to stay on your website. This, consequentially, will increase the amount of repeat visitors and orders, too.

Of course, if someone finds your website inaccessible and decides to sue you, you can even lose money.

As mentioned earlier, website accessibility is a legal requirement
- US: Section 508
- UK: Code of Law (PDF)
- Europe: yet to be released, but there are moves in this direction already

If you haven’t yet considered improving your website accessibility, now is the right time to start considering it, at least.

Related posts:

• Web Accessibility will become a legal requirement in Europe
• Neat Redesign’s two month’s digest
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines: for web designers?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 28th, 2006 at 4:37 am and is filed under Accessibility, Usability, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.