Why be accessible?

Being accessible makes your sites more usable for everyone. For example, the television remote control was originally invented for people with limited mobility, now everyone uses them. An Italian inventor built the first typewriter to help a blind countess write legibly. So from the typewriter to the remote control, special access tools developed for disabled individuals eventually become conveniences for everyone. The bottom line is that accessible websites help everyone. Also increasing the overall usability of a website can improve visitor traffic and productivity.

Legal requirements are a major reason to be concerned about web accessibility. Any government website that is on-line is required by law to be accessible, and while there is no legal obligation for a company's website to be accessible it makes sound business sense for several reasons. Firstly, it makes your website available to a vast array of people to whom it would otherwise go unnoticed. Secondly, it makes your website more usable for everyone. As with the example of the remote control, as screen reader and voice recognition technologies improve people will use them as a matter of course when viewing websites. Lastly, your competitors websites are becoming accessible, so yours must also.

Changes to the internet have made websites less accessible over time so the issue of accessibility has never been more important. If you create inaccessible content, you ignore part of your audience. Some developers write off this audience because they think the number of people in need of accessible web content is too small to consider, but in actual fact one in ten people have some form of disability. And two thirds of that figure have a severe disability. That’s over 600 million people across the world.

There is a perception that accessibility means creating sites with limited appeal. When we talk about accessibility, we are never throwing out visual design that is useful for sighted users. What we are doing is ensuring that the visual design doesn’t communicate fundamental information that isn’t available in any other form and building designs that step out of the way of users that can’t use them. When we make claims of equivalence, we are ensuring that the alternatives we create are providing the same quality of experience to the user, not simply the same information.

Designing websites where accessibility is an essential component of the project is crucial. The myth that you have to give up your creativity in exchange for accessibility is absolutely not the case. While it’s true that layout graphics hinder some users with visual or cognitive impairments, many non-disabled users also benefit from well designed visual layouts. With the help of W3C standards compliance designers are able to produce flexible visual layouts that enhance content for a wide variety of users.

Web development teams commonly make more work for themselves by making accessibility something they do as an afterthought rather than making it a design feature. It is much easier to design an accessible website than it is to redesign a site to make it accessible.

Some arguments about implementing accessibility are that the cost is too high and, in many projects, there’s some truth to this. If accessibility is delayed until the last stages before deployment, costs for redesigning user interface and visual layout to separate content from presentation and meet accessibility requirements can be substantial. In truth, the high cost that gets assigned to accessibility is actually the cost of correcting a bad content design. By planning for accessibility from the beginning, we can reduce this cost.

The fact is that all people have different levels of visual, perceptual, auditory, and navigational skills. Our goal is to provide balanced accessibility solutions. Web developers who focus on accessibility requirements in the design of web pages make them more usable by everyone.