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If you don't make your website accessible you are effectively
telling whole groups of people that they don't have any right to be
interested in what your site has to offer.
Accessibility
refers to the design and development of web pages in order that they
can be viewed and interacted with by anyone, despite any disabilities
that they may have. Clearly some disabilities will affect a person's
ability to engage in the web more than others. Visual problems are
usually considered the greatest barrier to web access, however it is
important to remember that those with other kinds of disabilities, such
as auditory, cognitive, neurological or physical, could also be
affected to varying degrees.
There is often a
perception that accessibility and cutting-edge design don't go
together, but this is simply not true; your creative flair does not
need to be suppressed by the need for accessibility.
How do I know if it's relevant to me?
Here's
how you can tell whether it's relevant to you or not - if you have a
website, it is. It's easy to make assumptions about whether people with
certain disabilities will be interested in your site or not, but it's
worth remembering that people have varying reasons for visiting
websites; they may be undertaking some research, or may be buying a
product or service for somebody else. Just because your site is about
clay pigeon shooting, don't assume that a blind person won't want to
visit it.
Making websites accessible is often seen
as a chore or a burden, some people will grudgingly do the minimum to
meet basic requirements, or will just not bother at all, knowing that
in all likelihood they will get away with it. But make no mistake, if
your website is not accessible, you are discriminating against disabled
people. Aside from the legal and moral obligation, why would you want
to turn away a significant number of potential visitors to your site?
You spend time making sure your site works in different browsers
because you want as many people as possible to be able to use your
site, and yet accessibility for disabled people is often not given the
same high priority. Additionally, an accessible website is likely to be
more search-engine friendly than one which isn't, so making your site
accessible can potentially increase general traffic.
So what should I do?
The
legal side of accessibility can be confusing; laws in most countries
specify, or imply, that websites must, as far as is reasonably
practicable, be accessible to disabled people, and yet how this should
be achieved is in the main not defined in law. The Web Content
Accessibility Guidelines (currently WCAG 1.0) produced by the World
Wide Web Consortium (W3C) are not themselves legal requirements, but
are considered the benchmark in terms of guidelines and so should be
your first port of call. An overview of the guidelines is available at:
http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag.php.
Some of the guidelines are open to interpretation, but W3C do offer
some tips and techniques to help with implementation, and striving to
follow these guidelines, at least to minimum standard should ensure
that your site complies with the law in most countries.
Accessibility
should be built in to your website plan from the start, it is much more
difficult, and potentially costly, to try and add accessibility
features in to an already completed website. However if you code to
strict standards you will by default have met many of the accessibility
requirements.
If your site is already built and you
are not sure how accessible it is, there are online tools available to
help you check its accessibility, for example http://webxact.watchfire.com/ or http://www.wave.webaim.org/
. These work by comparing particular aspects of the site against
accessibility guidelines. There are also simple checks you can do
yourself. Go into your browser options and turn off the graphics, turn
off Javascript, turn off or disable anything which can be turned off or
disabled. Can you still navigate your site? Can you still read all the
content? Can you still interact with the site where needed? If the
answer is 'no' to any of those questions, then your site is not fully
accessible.
Many websites offer a text-only version
of their site, and whilst this can serve a purpose, it can also
reinforce the marginalization that disabled visitors may already feel
in society and is no substitute for making your main site accessible.
Additionally, a text-only version is really only helpful for blind
people using screen-readers, it does not consider the needs of those
for instance with certain learning difficulties, such as dyslexia, who
may find a whole bank of text somewhat daunting. Clearly it is not
possible to create a site that fully meets the needs of every
individual, but to think that having a text-only version of your site
means you have taken care of accessibility is at best naive.
In summary
Making
your website accessible makes good legal sense, good moral sense and
good business sense. It doesn't only benefit disabled people, it
benefits all of your site visitors as it ensures that everyone has the
best chance of being able to fully access all of the information on
your site, which in turn means it also benefits you. There are
countless good reasons for making your website accessible, but no good
reasons for not doing so.
Vanessa Wennerstrom works for a university in SE England and is currently setting up her own web design business.
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