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.

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.

A recent research by the Wichita Psychology University analyzed the influence of text-align and page layout (1, 2 and 3 columns) on visitors’ reading speed and comprehension.

For instance, the obvious results were that two-column full-justified text is read with almost the same speed than one-column left-justified text but a lot faster than one-column full-justified text and other two and three column variants.

The ministers of 34 European countries have met together to focus on improving access to information to more people. This includes improving websites accessibility and also increasing broadband reach.

Some have been noticing that Web Content Accessibility Guidelines themselves were not quite accessible to their target readers - the webmasters.

The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has even created three sections of the guidelines: general description, about understanding the guidelines and the techniques, used to comply with them. It is quite ironic the organization, which goal is to create accessible web content, created more or less complex instructions for the web designers.