Accessibility is a huge problem, with recent surveys estimating that one in three people visiting a website have problems accessing its content. And as mobile devices gain in popularity, an increasing proportion of your audience will be demanding websites that are more accessible.
Improving accessibility is a huge opportunity to improve business, and for small firms to expand; the audience for accessible sites goes far beyond those with a severe disability.
If you're trying to fix accessibility problems, then you need a smarter approach than checklists, Bobby Tests and technical standards. By addressing accessibility as a strategic, mainstream issue, businesses can increase their audience, raise customer satisfaction and decrease maintenance costs.
Accessibility isn't ‘www for the blind'
Don't make the mistake that ‘accessible sites' are ‘ones that work for blind users'. The audience for accessible sites is vast. It includes people accessing websites from mobile phones; people with non-Microsoft browsers; people with mild disabilities (like dyslexia), those who are in a distracting environment (like mothers shopping online at home) and those who have an average reading age.
Your web audience may have more accessibility problems than you think:
4% have a sight problem
6% access via a mobile phone or PDA
12% use non - Microsoft browsers
50% have a reading age of 12 or less
The end of ‘Bobby Test' accessibility
Most website owners have focused their accessibility efforts on their obligation to meet legal requirements. This has led to a ‘cover your rear' approach to accessibility.
Checklists and tools such as ‘Bobby' have been used to ‘prove' accessibility. These tools operate by finding technical problems. The UK's Disability Rights Commissioner points out that "the most important [accessibility issues] are qualitative...Automated tools alone cannot verify [accessibility]". In short: checklists aren't enough.
Re-defining accessibility
To ensure your site is accessible, you need to start by going back to your business goals. Remember that you want to help users
complete a task, such as finding information, paying a bill, or making a purchase. And you want them to be able to do this no matter how they're plugged into your system.
So you need a model that shows what steps the users go through (navigation), and what information they need at each step (content). Next you need technology that lets you present the same content in lots of different ways. And you need a policy that considers users' abilities when you commission your site. In other words, accessibility is a strategic decision, not something to be left in the hands of the HTML coders.
One of the great benefits of accessible design is that it brings a natural search engine advantage. Google is notoriously secretive about its search algorithms. But all you need to know is that Google's search engine rates pages in the same way that people rate pages. It looks at headlines, links text, keywords on the page and so on. A big part of accessibility is ensuring that these types of content work on all platforms - including Google. So by designing for accessibility, you're also improving your site's ‘find-ability' in Google.
Solving the puzzle
If you read the official accessibility guidelines (known as W3C WAI WCAG) you'll see that most are just good sense. The majority either remind you to write good code or make your site easy to use. The rest are warnings like ‘don't make large areas of the screen flash' (it can induce fits in some epileptics, and irritates everyone else).
It's never inspiring to read a list of don'ts, but the fact is that most people break the accessibility guidelines accidently, rather than through necessity.
Putting a page together is often rather like solving a Japanese tangram - wondering how to make everything fit into a pleasing whole. Designing for accessibility adds another layer - it's a puzzle solving challenge. What's more, because most accessibility guidelines are, at heart, good communication guidelines, designing for accessibility generally makes pages simpler, stronger and bolder.
It is vital to map out how all users of all abilities will use the site. Identify quick wins that will help build audience numbers and put in place the procedures, targets and techniques that will let site managers make their sites genuinely accessible, more satisfying to use and easier to maintain.
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