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Accessibility for Better Business

Businesses of all sizes are missing out on opportunities to create new leads and make more sales because they aren’t following basic web accessibility practices. That’s according to a new white paper from CMS developer Squiz. Ian Delaney reports.

Accessibility is often viewed as an extra, or an afterthought to websites, despite legislation in this area such as the DDA. The argument against making accessibility core runs along the lines of "people with disabilities are such a small minority, so how could you possibly justify the extra expense?" according to the report’s authors.

However, accessibility is not just about people with a disability, the report maintains, but rather helps from the beginning to the end of the sales cycle, in six key areas:

1) Better Search Position

In a nutshell, good SEO works in the following way: Google (and other search engines) get to know you via the ‘bots’ or ‘spiders’ that they send out to review your site.  So the end game in SEO is to help them to understand who you are and what you do by providing as much practical information as possible within your code - preferably in the shape of the keywords (or search terms) that you’d like to be associated with.

2) Better User Experience

the practice of ‘usability’ will help everyone without disabilities to use your site, and that ‘accessibility’ efforts will help everyone (period!) to use your site more effectively.

3) Can Attract and Retain More Users

The definition of people who need some of the accessibility features you might consider is far less of a minority than you might initially think, including.

• Short sighted (but not short of cash)
• Older than you (but more interested in you than the ‘average’ web Joe)
• Less familiar with the web (less comfortable with a mouse, but very much so with budgets)
• Temporarily less able than you (they broke an arm playing polo at the weekend)
• Linguistically challenged (but experts in their fields)
• Technically challenged (accessing your site via a hotel’s 56k connection)
• …or plain old disabled (over 500 million people!)

4) Reduced Maintenance Costs

Accessible sites are likely consist of separate content and presentation layers, meaning that if the site needs a redesign, only a part of the code is affected. Most sites will use Cascading Style Sheets to format their content, which is good news in terms of both accessibility and maintenance: "the use of style sheets will allow you to cost-effectively develop a separate, accessible version of your site, or at the very least enable you to make it more accessible by letting you tweak it more easily".

5) Greater Site Flexibility

For similar reasons, an approach which divides content storage and creation from its presentation to users will be a lot easier to change in order to implement new features.

6) Reduced Legal Exposure

Your web site is your door onto the world, and it needs to be hinged properly so that you can get out and your audience can get in.  At the same time, you must realise that you can’t restrict your audience - the web is extremely open by nature - so you have to build and design broadly.  This means ensuring that your content can be accessed by absolutely everyone, otherwise you run the risk of being sued on a discriminatory basis.

The full report, which also contains advice for getting started and a plain-English guide to the standards you should be aspiring to, is available on the Squiz web site.