What is accessibility?

Accessibility as a concept is simple; everyone should be able to visit a website and use it as easily as possible. An accessible website is one that puts as few barriers in the way of a user as possible. Barriers can come in many forms because not every user is the same and not everyone accesses the Internet in the same way.

A common example of a barrier for a user is the text on a website. Text that is too small or too large can be hard to read and it is even worse if it cannot be resized. Choosing an easily readable text size and allowing it to be resized means users will find your site easier to use, because if a user finds a website hard to use you can be sure they will leave and not come back!

The above example is a small accessibility issue; others such as making sure a website is compatible with screen readers (these read out the website to users with poor or no vision) require a lot more time and effort to implement, especially for existing sites. While technical solutions are down to web designers & developers, everyone involved in a website needs to be able to appreciate accessibility and know why it is important for their business.

Why is accessibility important for business?

For a website to be successful it must provide a return on it's investment; there are many ways to measure this, but at some point it comes down to the people visiting your website. A website that everyone can use easily is going to be more successful then one that creates problems for users.

On the Internet even a small minority can have a large number of your potential customers; putting barriers in their way is not going to put you in their good books, even worse it can drive them to a more accessible competitor and they won't keep that bad experience to themselves!

"People who are X (insert disability eg. blindness) won't want to buy my product, what use would they have for it?" is a comment occasionally raised to excuse lack of accessibility. If someone wants to be your customer then let them! Just because you can't imagine why someone wants something doesn't mean they won't want it (the crazy frog is a prime example). It could be for themself, for a present, or they may even just want to have a look.

So without touching on legal or moral issues, an accessible website means more visitors can use your site, which has got to be good. There is a lot that can be done to make a website accessible, much of it technical, but if you have a website it makes sense to have a look to see how accessible it is!

The accessibility test

A good way to check the accessibility of your website is to site down and watch how someone not experienced with your website uses it. Here are some questions to them:

• Is the text easy to read?
• Are elements (such as animations) of the site distracting from the content?
• Is navigation easy?
• Do you know where you are and where you can go to?
• Does the site load quickly?
• How does your site look in other web browsers?

Here's a very good test; go to a page on your website and copy everything, now paste this page into a new text file (not Microsoft Word) and see what it looks like (you should just see text, no images), can you still easily understand it? Lots of people accessing the internet, for a variety of reasons can not use or understand images, layouts and colours; by viewing your website like this you can get an idea of how much trouble these people have to go through!

We have just dipped a toe into the deep water that is accessibility; however we hope this article has given you a better understanding of accessibility, the issues involved and what it means for yourself.

If you would like more information about this topic or to discuss what could be done to your website please get in contact with us. If you have any feed back or suggestions for a possible topic for an article or would like something made exclusively for you please contact us.