News.
Help everyone get access to your website
By Guy Anderson & Wladimir Baranoff-Rossine, The Journal
If you’re running a business, wouldn’t you say it’s a teeny bit silly to exclude over nine million people from buying your products and services before you’ve even started?
It sounds simple, but around 80% of businesses in the UK don’t seem to agree. That’s how many UK websites fail to provide even the most basic accessibility standards for people with disabilities.
Disabled people make up 12% of the UK’s population, with a disposable income of more than £50bn. So if you don’t make your website easy for them to use by including some simple, common sense features, you’re effectively cutting them off.
Web accessibility is much more than just access for the disabled. It’s about giving anyone unhindered access to a website from various devices, such as web-enabled televisions, mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs).
It’s also about giving access to users who have different screen sizes, browser types and settings, or those who cannot or don’t use plug-ins such as Flash.
Web accessibility is about ensuring your website is accessible to the widest possible audience - something that can only have a positive impact on your business. Make your website accessible and you’ll see two major benefits right away. Your turnover should increase as more customers become able to access your service. You will also save money because accessible sites are usually easier to maintain, and your pages will load quicker so you’ll save on bandwidth.
Improving the accessibility of your website needn’t be expensive. Here’s a few tips:
* Make the text easy to read - break up large blocks of text with headings, bullet points and quotes.
* Font size - ensure users can alter this in their Web browser so that visually impaired people can change the size if they wish.
* ALT tags’ - include alternative text equivalents for video, PDF files, Flash movies or audio so people using screen readers (which visually impaired people use to read websites), mobile phones or PDAs can access the information.
* Hypertext links - Use text that makes sense when read out of context. For example, avoid `click here’. Also ensure it’s obvious what is a hyperlink and what isn’t (hyperlinks are usually underlined, or a different colour).
* Browser friendly - ensure your website is displayed properly to users with different web browsers,
Once you’ve done all this you can test the accessibility of your website at http://validator.w3.org or www.cynthiasays.com
Wladimir Baranoff-Rossine is project manager at accessible shopping cart specialists Dpivision.com Ltd.
Last Updated: April 11, 2008