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Why Accessibility Matters

01 February, 2008

Metaesthetic UK, Ltd. founder, Jason Hoyt, discusses the importance and benefits of making online content accessible.

Making your organisation's web sites accessible matters to you and your visitors for a variety of reasons:

  • Standards compliant + future-forward best practices
  • SEO 
  • The best possible user experience across the board
  • The Long Tail
  • Legal protection

Standards Compliant + Future-Forward Best Practices

If you're developing your web site with a eye towards DOCTYPE validation and accessibility then your web site is more than ready to accommodate your accessible visitors — your web site is also ready for the next wave of user-agents.  Standards-compliant sites work well with mobile and hand-held browsers and should be more scalable to user-agents yet to come.

SEO

As above, an accessible web site is more user-agent friendly and often organisations put a lot of importance into Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).  Spiders and bots often index and visualise your web site just as a visually-impaired visitor might.  When your site is more accessible to a wide-variety of visitors it should be more easily indexed and therefore should rank higher on many organic SERP pages.

The Best Possible User Experience Across the Board

Just as a visitor who uses site to navigate your site you can also provide visualisation techniques to visitors who use accessibility shortcuts.  Make sure to provide a set of "quick links" near the top of your UI template to ensure that screen readers can pick up these short cuts.  If your sited visitors can navigate your site quickly then make sure that all your visitors have the best possible user experience as possible.  Adding a layer of keyboard/navigation shortcuts can ease a lot of frustration for your accessible visitors without interfering with experience of other visitors.

The Long Tail

We should all be aware of the importance of The Long Tail by now.  Why isolate or make it difficult for any visitors to be able to find your call-to-actions, products, check-out lanes, etc.?  Make sure to accommodate even the smallest number of demographic visitors and you can make even more sales.

Legal Protection

And lastly, protect yourself from legal issues.  If you offer sited visitors a good user experience then be sure to make an equally impressive user experience for your accessible visitors and user-agents.  In most countries it's most likely a law to treat your visitors equally and without bias.