Website accessibility isn’t just about social justice or avoiding law suits; designing with accessibility in mind provides benefits for all your clients.

In Australia, perhaps the most high-profile case to examine web accessibility remains McGuire v SOCOG  . In this landmark case, SOCOG (the Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games) was ordered to pay Bruce McGuire (a blind man who uses a screen reader to access the web) $20,000 compensation for the fact that their website had been constructed in a way that made it impossible for him to use certain features. Despite this cautionary tale, it is tempting for small-to-medium-sized businesses to ask whether the ‘extra’ effort is worthwhile to limit the fairly low risk of a lawsuit.

But how much extra effort is genuinely required to create an accessible website, and who actually benefits?

One of the defences put to HREOC (the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission) by SOCOG was that making the relevant pages of the website accessible would require extraordinary levels of time and effort. This was countered by expert evidence asserting first that the many pages requiring work didn’t need to be rewritten individually (a relatively small number of standard templates could be used) and second that it would have been almost no extra work if it had been planned for from the start.

Who benefits?

There are parallels in the physical world. Providing wheelchair access as part of the design of a new building is straightforward, adding little if any cost; adding it to an existing building may require modifications which are both expensive and ugly. And providing a ramp for people with wheelchairs, crutches and walking sticks also makes life (and access to a business) easier for people pushing prams, delivery van drivers with goods trolleys and travelling executives dragging wheeled cabin bags.

Accessible design has obvious payoffs for people using assistive technologies such as screen readers for the blind – even people who are both deaf and blind can interact independently with the wider world through the medium of the internet. And don’t forget that baby boomers are reaching the age when their vision and dexterity are becoming progressively more impaired – meeting the needs of this generation provides an opportunity for your business to grow. (BusinessWeek, 2001  )

The features which contribute to accessible design also tend to produce pages which are smaller and faster to load and which don’t require elaborate reworking to allow them to be accessed through mobile phones or personal digital assistants. Faster page loading times also benefit the significant number of internet users who do not, even now, have access to broadband.

When Legal & General group rebuilt their website to be compliant with accessibility standards, they gained  :

• increased traffic
• reduced maintenance costs
• increased sales.

Internet search engines can be compared with screen readers, in that they interpret the underlying code of a page and cannot use visual cues to interpret the meaning or relative importance of the different elements which make it up. Accessible design contributes to your site being indexed correctly by major search engines and directories such as Google and Yahoo: Google’s Webmaster guidelines   include the advice that ‘… most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx [a text browser] would.’

Truly accessible design takes into account the needs of people who:

• use screen readers or Braille interfaces
• need large (perhaps very large) font sizes
• can’t distinguish red text on a green background
• have tremor disorders like Parkinson’s disease
• can’t use a mouse for one reason or another.

This isn’t easy, but it isn’t rocket science either: more than anything it requires an approach which treats universal access as a basic feature rather than something it is nice to have if it doesn’t cost anything. It requires designers and builders to accept the challenge of fulfilling Tim Berners-Lee’s dream:

The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect. (Web Accessibility Initiative  )

This doesn’t mean that your website has to be boring either: most of the visually stunning pages at CSSzengarden   are accessible. It does mean that if you offer a service in a way which creates barriers for people with particular disabilities, you need to think about more accessible alternatives.

Achieving accessibility

If your website is a key element of your business, it needs to be accessible. To achieve this, you can rely on automated checkers, your web design team, or an independent accessibility audit. Automated checkers can only check the most basic mistakes: they can identify an image without an alt attribute (which describes the image and may appear when you mouse over it, and is spoken aloud by a screen reader), but not one with an alt attribute that provides no useful information. For example, a graphic used to indicate a link to the next page could omit the alt attribute (which an automated check would flag), or include alt=“right arrow” (which it wouldn’t). A competent human editor would suggest a more useful alt attribute, describing the function of the graphic (alt=“next page”) rather than its appearance.

As an example of what not to do, Jim Thatcher   described a US government agency website (since rebuilt) which would have passed all automated checks while at the same time providing many users – not only those using screen readers – with an almost unusable site.

For each business it is both a social justice challenge – even if it were legal it would not be ethical to choose to exclude people with disabilities from your site – and a commercial one. With so many inaccessible websites out there, an accessible site has the opportunity to appeal to a significant, and growing, segment of the population.

Contact me to discuss ways of making your site more accessible.