Why sites need to consider accessibility
One of my arguments from the Ling discussion (which I will not be discussing any further) was in relation to accessibility. Accessibility is “a general term used to describe the degree to which a product (e.g., device, service, environment) is accessible by as many people as possible.” It has become a more important term within the web sphere as the lines between the abled and impaired are blurred – therefore it is really important that sites are developed in a way to make them accessible to everyone. But why?
The Visually Impaired Can Use the Internet Too!
There are so many ways the visually impaired can use the internet these days. Screenreaders and high contrast functions on browsers assist those who would have not been able to literally see sites in the past new ways of viewing the information.
Try downloading a screenreader and having it run through your site (I currently have Thunder installed). You’ll be surprised by the way it reads through the site – as although it be may logical to see a site in a certain way, it may not be logical to hear.
The W3C Has Defined Standards
The W3C has developed their own set of standards, called the Web Accessibility Initiative, which I really recommend that you download and have a look at. The standards aren’t actually that hard to implement and most of the requirements don’t take up too much time to code, such as:
- Meaningful alt tags to images – So people understand what each image is supposed to be.
- Multiple ways to access links – If you only use graphics (such as Amazon.com), those using a screen reader may find it hard to select links.
- HTML only versions of pages – So those who don’t use Flash or Javascript can still access the key components and information on your page
- Skip to Content – Allows those using screen readers to bypass a collection of links to get to the good stuff on your site
More Visitors = More Engagement = Increased Profits!
At the end it all boils down to that if more people can use your site, there is an increased likelihood of more engagement with your site (especially if you’re the first organisation within your industry to make your site really accessible) and could open up a whole new segment with your organisation; which can lead to more profits. Even if your site isn’t a business or doesn’t believe that the visually impaired will be directly using your site- they may be the key decision makers within an organisation, and if they are not able to extract the content from your website, then the won’t be able to utilise it.
Posted on December 6, 2009, in Internet and tagged accessibility, linkedin, thunder, w3c, w3c wai, web accessibility. Bookmark the permalink. 4 Comments.
she’s doing things
Hi Jess, I had a scan of your war-of-words with LingLing and was definitely struggling to pick a side.
Ultimately I think that Lings website is all she needs it to be right now. When those year 10 students are looking for a car though, it might be a different story. I think websites like that have a use-by-date we haven’t reached yet (got to love baby boomers and gen x, they’re funny) but is rapidly approaching… gen z start to turn 18 this year.
In this post, I think your points are really admirable and I can’t fault you for sticking up for the little guys (and I really agree that a lot of mainstream sites – e.g. banks, telcos – should be vision impaired friendly; no idea if they are or not) but at the end of the day, for the vast majority of businesses out there it’s about utility and means/ends.
Like just about anything in life adding the sort of features you talk about brings us to the law of diminishing returns. The vast majority of businesses simply do not extract enough value out of those features to justify spending the time/resources implementing them.
For example, the CSS editor I occasionally play around in tells me if what I’m doing is IE4 and Netscape4 complient (both released 1997). But if it throws an error, do I really care that those people can’t view the site perfectly? In Lings case she probably should!
But for most of us, those people are so small in number and so unlikely to be our target market, there’s absolutely no point trying to service them, you’d be compromising too much and wasting too much time strategising and coding work-arounds.
Although my inital perspective has changed from just being about usability to being about achieving client goals – usability and functionality are the cornerstones for achieving these goals (See my presentation – The Golden Key to Websites).
I’m currently reading this book: “Web Design and Marketing Solutions for Business Websites” which outlines what businesses when designing and setting up their sites. One of the parts is just on accessibility, and I have since learned that accessibility is more than just the blind using websites – those with impaired motor skills, colour blindness and the deaf also are disadvantaged when accessing websites.
You discussed SEO in your other post. Good SEO practices are fulfilled when utilising alt tags and title attributes within sites – my book calls Google the “Blind Billionaire”, as Google’s robots pretty much just go through the text version of a site – which is exactly how screen readers utilise sites for the web.
Although accessibility upgrades may be considered to be a massive cost – it’s just small things that make the biggest difference – putting in alt tags and making clicking areas in menus bigger may not take that long, but it can also improve the overall maintainability of the site – imagine if someone wanted to update their design and all of the CSS formats were hard coded into the HTML (i.e. font sizes) – it would take a lot of time to fix up the design. By using more flexible types, such as div tags, you can more easily update the design. This means that you can also create high contrast or big text versions for those who are impaired at the same time – so you win both ways and reduce maintenance costs (which everyone knows is a sore point with businesses and technology) down the track.
Target and Southwest Airlines have both been unsuccessfully sued when it comes to accessibility on their sites – showing that although there wasn’t a successful case brought against them; people felt strongly enough (or wanted to piss off people enough) to show this issue in society.
Although the W3C may have the WCAG, there are a few countries that do have accessibility laws in place – the UK (Where Ling’s site is based) has the Disability Discrimination Act 1995. This covers sites that provide services to customers – which is what Ling’s site does – and Part 3 states that it is “unlawful for a service provider to treat disabled people less favorably for a reason related to their disability” – so by preventing or ignoring these accessibilty rules, she could possibly be breaking the law. To be honest, it’s a shame I didn’t find this when I was having my argument with Ling and I have absolutely no intention of forwarding this or starting up the fight again.
I completely understand that the business perspective is all about acheving goals, but to achieve these goals, they need to understand the IT component so they can achieve that perfect relationship of usability and functionality.
I did see your “Golden Key” preso, very nice work. And agree with most of what you say above. All good points.
Don’t think you’d have much luck claiming Ling was “treat(ing) disabled people less favorably for a reason related to their disability”, with “for a reason related to their disability” being the key bit there.
But yeah, I think you’d be crazy to want to start that fire up again! Choose your battles ey.