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Website Accessibility - Ensuring You Provide
| Over the last twelve years, web accessibility has become a bigger and bigger issue. With the Sydney Organising Committee of the Olympic Games losing a court case against them due to their website not being usable by a blind man, it is worth bearing accessibility in mind when designing, creating and maintaining a website. So what is an accessible website? It's actually a fairly simple concept. If a website is usable on all mediums that can potentially access it, and by all people with the technology to access it, then it is accessible. Putting that concept into practise is much harder; images must be described in detail for blind users, colours must be considered for the colour-blind, any audio must be transcribed, or videos subtitled, for deaf users, text should be large for those with sight problems, and the page must be easily navigable for those with motor difficulties. In the extreme, accessibility requires websites to cater for those with cognitive or mental difficulties, including those with short term memory problems. It even includes considerations for slow internet connections. Many of those will sound like constraints. How can a flash-based website be easily designed with all of that in mind? Or a picture-heavy site cater to those with slow internet connections? The answer is almost as simple as the initial concept: different options. By creating different versions of a website (a low-bandwidth version, an html-based, rather than flash-based, version, a version with a smaller amount of pictures, or the pictures spread over multiple pages) the site can still be seen in the intended manner, but also cater to absolutely everybody. Why is accessibility a concern though? Apart from the legal ramifications that not catering to blind or deaf people could bring, by not accommodating everybody, a website is cutting itself off from a large portion of its potential audience. There are plenty of different guidelines to follow when making your website accessible, depending on the country the website is catering for. Canada, Spain, the Philippines, Sweden, the UK, and Japan all have their own guidelines, some more rigorously enforced than others. The universal standard, though, tends to be the guidelines established by the World Wide Web Consortium; the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 in 1999, and 2.0 in 2008. These guidelines all have their critics though, on top of which there are the added cost and time requirements that creating a truly accessible website require. It's not just developing duplicate web pages; if a flash-based website has to be converted to HTML it can be a massive undertaking. There is also the issue of hosting multiple versions of the website, the space that requires, and training people to be familiar with what information is needed by the software that converts text to speech. There's also the issue of accurately describing photos. Ultimately, when deciding how much effort to devote to making an accessible website, it is up to you, but putting genuine thought into the whole process is a must. |
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Tom Sangers contributes regularly to Online SEO Blog. They offer SEO advice.
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