Accessibility
Why bother?
Accessibility is a huge topic in web design, and is about making sites available to as many people as possible, regardless of technology, and ability. Getting it wrong can attract bad press and critisism, but the Disability Discrimination Act of 1995 means that it could also land you in court!
There are lots of reasons for making sites accessible!
There are almost 10 million disabled people in the UK and millions more whose eyesight and dexterity is deteriorating with age. There are also those users who access the web under less than ideal conditions – either on the move, or over a slow modem connection. So, that’s a lot of potential customers to annoy, or to exclude altogether!
In fact accessible sites are easier for everyone. The goodwill and trust built by a positive browsing experience goes a long way towards converting a satisfied visitor into a satisfied customer!
A bonus of accessibility is that the design features that make your site behave well across all sorts of browsing scenarios, also help search engine spiders to index it properly. Accessible sites are better indexed sites, winning you better ranking in the search engine results pages – yes, more traffic!
How to be Accessible?
Basic accessibility is not difficult, or expensive!
The Web Accessibility Initiative, (WAI), developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, W3C, has helped us all by publishing Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, (WCAG), complete with checklists and validation tools for designers and developers.
Recommendations include:
- Use of standards-compliant HTML, and CSS.
- Provision of alternatives to images and multimedia content.
- Specifying text sizes so that they can be re-sized larger by users’ browser settings.
- Taking care over text colour and background choices to assist dyslexic, and colour-blind visitors.
PSA 78 offers best practice guidelines for the commissioning of accessible websites, and version 2.0 of W3C‘s WCAG have already been proposed, so there is plenty of advice out there! Between us, by now, we should have accessibility covered!
At getpepper™ we take accessibility seriously, and design with WCAG compliance in mind. We delight in checking off those WCAG ticklists, and aim to exceed basic compliance wherever possible!