Research indicates that adhering to the principles of web page accessibility, when designing a web site will give access to nearly 48% of the UK population that would previously potentially have been excluded. In simple terms, making an accessible web site via accessible web site design techniques means that 48% more potential customers can use your web site.
How Can Web Page Accessibility Help?
The same techniques that are used to ensure web page accessibility can make your web site available on devices other than a PC. PDAs, mobile phones and WebTV are growing ways of accessing a web site and using accessible web design techniques means your web site is available on these devices.
Having an accessible web site design means that the code used to build the web site is intrinsically very clean. Because your web site code is clean this makes it easier for Search Engines such as Google or Yahoo to understand your site and rank it better in search results.
Accessible web site design is also ‘future proof’. This means that an accessible web site is built using a technology that ensures that the web site won’t display incorrectly even if web browsers change how they display a web site in the future. A non accessible web site by contrast is typically built using coding techniques that mean it will display incorrectly at some point in the near future.
Web Sites and Accessibility
Sites are made in a way that all users will be able to navigate and use the site without any fuss or complications no matter what they are using to view the site.
The user can use the tab key to move through the menu and hitting enter on a link selects that link.
All links have title text which means the user can understand what the link is for.
All Link phrases make sense when read out of context.
Images have alt text to describe the image to the user.
Text is resizable so a user can have control using the mouse or the menu to have the size text they want.
Colours on the site contrast with each other very well so the user can read the text easily.
Forms have the label next to the field made clickable.
As the site has been made using CSS all design details are held in a separate file which in short means the page has only the details that you want to read within it. This is good for screen readers as they would read these parts out to the users which are totally useless.
