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Tap Into a $1 Trillion Market by Making Your Website Accessible for All
Minor Changes to a Website's Design Respond to the Needs of People with Disabilities
Having a website that is accessible for all users, including people with disabilities, is a smart business tool that offers many benefits to your business. Foremost among these is greater market exposure. There are many resources available to help you make your website as user-friendly as it can possibly be.
What is Website Accessibility?
Web accessibility refers to the practice of making web pages on the Internet usable for all visitors, especially those with disabilities, who represent $1 trillion in annual aggregate consumer spending. Consider these examples.
Example 1: A person who is blind cannot see images, but if a short description is provided, his or her screen reader (a special software program used to read the web page) can navigate the image and make it accessible to the user.
Example 2: Many people with disabilities use only a keyboard or speech recognition software on their computers instead of a standard mouse. If a hyperlink is created that can only be followed if you click on it (as opposed to tabbing to), then the person with a disability cannot access this information.
What Will an Accessible Website Do For Me?
Creating an accessible website will bring many benefits to your business. The most obvious is exposure to a larger customer base, such as people who are using the computer differently due to disability or age-related limitations, using slower computer processors or viewing the web on a portable device. Another plus of accessible sites is that site maintenance is easier. Accessible websites based on accessibility standards typically have smaller file sizes, which means that pages load more quickly and consume less bandwidth.
An additional benefit of an accessible website is that it can be more available to search engines. Poorly structured, inaccessible websites often mean that relevant text is misinterpreted by search engines, resulting in lost search engine listings. Having a cleanly structured website based on accessibility standards can ensure that your site is correctly listed in search engines.
How Do I Make My Website Accessible?
It is not difficult to create an accessible website, especially when accessibility and usability are part of the design and planning process. There are many resources available to guide you in developing and maintaining an accessible website:
The World Wide Web Consortium Web Accessibility Initiative has developed in-depth guidelines and is a leader in web accessibility.
The federal government has adopted a set of standards referred to as "Section 508", which are a good starting point for page architecture.
These standards and guidelines identify the most important areas to address in relation to potential accessibility issues, including headers, navigation, document linearization, user input (forms), hyperlink text, multimedia content and images.
If your website already exists, you can use automated evaluation and repair software to assess your site's accessibility. Three tools to consider:
A-Prompt from the University of Toronto: a free tool to help the author repair issues.
AccVerify: a website evaluation and reporting tool that can stand-alone or be integrated into a content management system.
Functional Accessibility Evaluator: a free tool that analyzes web resources for markup consistent with W3C content guidelines.
Keep in mind, however, that many website accessibility issues are subjective
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