Calgary Web Designer Jenn Armour | Info Architecture + User Centric Web Design + Online Marketing + Social Media + Ideas

Why web developer’s should care about accessibility

// January 18th, 2009 // Strategy

Web accessibility refers to:

..the practice of making websites usable by people of all abilities and disabilities and the principle that all web users should have access to information available on the internet.

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You can be assured that many surfers on the net may be blind or visually impaired, motor impaired, paralysed. This is generally what we think of when the word “impaired” is used. However, it is important to broaden this view of impaired as it relates to accessibility. This would include cross-browser compatibility issues. If i can’t view information on my browser of choice, Safari, then the information is inaccessible. Further, lets consider the aging population of baby boomer’s rampant on the web. We have to consider text size as well! Don’t we? There is also the wide use of mobile browser’s to consider too. As a developer/designer i can get lazy and not implement strict practices of adhering to WACG.

Why it is important to design accessible web pages?

• – Increase market share and audience reach. By not locking out a large portion of users, you are of course opening the door for them.
• – Increase search engine listings and discovery. Seriously, a lot of the techniques employed while building accessible sites really do aid SEO. Cleaner code is easier to parse. Alternative text helps to describe your site and provides additional content. Captions, table summaries, text descriptions, anchor titles and meta-data all provide additional descriptive data bout your site.
• – Improve efficiency by reducing maintenance and sometimes bandwidth.
• – Demonstrate social responsibility.
• – Reduce the risk of any legal implications.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) represented the first major effort to establish guidelines for accessible design. This standard consists of 14 guidelines, each with three checkpoint levels for web developers to meet: Priority One, Priority Two, and Priority Three.

In individual countries, national standards emerged later. Section 508 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act is based on WCAG Priority One checkpoints. These same checkpoints serve as the basis for standards in Australia, France, Germany, and many other countries. The Common Look and Feel standard in Canada and Guidelines for U.K. Government Web Sites in the United Kingdom are based on Priorities One and Two of the WCAG.