Webforumz Newsletter - August 2007
Articles
Who Cares About Website Accessibility?
Who cares about website accessibility? The answer should be you. 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.