Neat Redesign

Apart from simply recognizing the need to market your product or service to the physically-challenged people and making your site accessible, you may as well rejoyce to know that Google Accessible Search can now give higher ranking to your accessible website.

Basically, Google currently values sites with simple markup that degrades nicely with images (and probably CSS - screen readers don’t understand CSS, most likely) turned off.

As simple markup ensures that website content may be accessible only using a keyboard, it’s another reason to use it.

Here are some quotes from the Google Accessible Search FAQ:

It tends to favor pages that degrade gracefully — pages with few visual distractions and pages that are likely to render well with images turned off.

Broadly, Google defines accessible websites and pages as content that the blind and visually challenged can use and consume using standard online technology…

Currently we take into account several factors, including a given page’s simplicity, how much visual imagery it carries and whether or not it’s primary purpose is immediately viable with keyboard navigation

Some of the basic recommendations on how to make a website more useable and accessible include keeping Web pages easy to read, avoiding visual clutter — especially extraneous content — and ensuring that the primary purpose of the Web page is immediately accessible with full keyboard navigation.

Basically, to make your site accessible, you’ll need to do the following:
- ensure that you use text anywhere you can
- provide text alternatives (alt and title attributes, audio and video transcripts, etc)
- use valid, simple markup (probably styling separated from content by means of CSS)
- use semantic markup (with headings, etc) to let visitors navigate easily

Read more at Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (2nd version, draft).

Here is a checklist for WCAG 2.0 and a checklist of the current official version of WCAG (1.0).

What more of a reason you need to make your site accessible?

It has to be noted that converting your site to CSS will make it easy for you to make your site accessible. Redesigning your site with CSS has some other benefits as well.

Related posts:

• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines: for web designers?
• How site accessibility can improve business
• Redesigned MSN Search goes live

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 26th, 2006 at 3:26 pm and is filed under Accessibility. 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.