Website accessibility is all about enabling website users, your customers, to access and use your online business service in a way that suits them. It is an all-inclusive approach to website design and development and one that you cannot afford to neglect, especially in the current economic climate.

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What Are The Benefits For My Business?

The benefits of ensuring website accessibility far out way any costs involved in the redevelopment of your website. Here are just a few benefits of having an accessible website:

An improved business image promotes credibility and confidence, providing reassurance for your customers. Through standards based website design and development, search engine rankings are likely to improve, resulting in more traffic to your website and therefore, potentially more business. Common sense tells us that if your market is opened up to a wider audience, you are more likely to generate more business. Through good design and development and the separation of content and presentation, websites are more efficient and economical to manage and administer. Compliance = No legal worries Accessibility goes hand in hand with good website usability which is beneficial for all website users and can result in up to 100% increase in online business

10 Things You Can Do Today

This is obviously, just an overview of website accessibility and is by no means meant to provide you with the information needed to assess your website accessibility comprehensively however, to obtain a quick snapshot of your website; here are 10 things you can do today:

Can you resize your text? If your website doesn’t allow the user to change the text size, this is a sure sign that your website is currently not accessible to all. Can your users change the way in which your website is viewed, for example colour contrast? It is important that users can choose various colour combinations of text and background colour such as a softer background or high-contrast combinations. When you roll over your website images, do you see a descriptive name for the image? If you answer no, you will need to add “alt” tags to your images. When you roll over decorative images or images used as bullet points, do you see a descriptive name for the image? If you answer yes, you should think about the relevance of this.

There is some debate as to whether ‘alt’ tags should be included on decorative images, spacers or bullet points. To be WAI WACG compliant (The World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) it is stated that all images must have ‘alt’ tags including decorative images and images used as bullet points etc however, it is recognised and we would agree, that for screen-reader technology, this is not necessarily the best approach and the ‘alt’ tags should be left blank as there is no meaning to convey. To add an image description in this instance may cause confusion or disorientation. Does your website have a sitemap? If not, you should provide one.

This not only helps human users that can’t find what they want on your website, but also helps search engines to index your website properly and therefore, potentially improve your search engine ranking. Do you provide easy-to-access information about how to use your website? If you do include accessibility tools on your website, tell your users how to use them. Provide help with regards to using forms or tools on your website. Do you use “click here”, “next” or “more” in links on your website? If so, think about providing a more meaningful phrase in the text of the link. Not only will this improve your users understanding of the link but you will also gain ‘brownie points’ for your search engine ranking if you link this in with your keywords on that particular website page. Is your website designed with the content and presentation separate? If you don’t use stylesheets for the ‘design’ of your website it is possible that some assistive and mobile technologies won’t be able to comfortably access and use your website. Check your website from a mobile device or a different browser. You may be surprised to see the results.

Take time to understand your users and how they use your website. Don’t assume they are all the same.

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