Accessible Wed Site for the Disabled

¶ … accessible to the disabled is a good business decision even when resources are limited. The most obvious reason for designing accessible websites is to increase the number of potential customers that can access the site, but there are other benefits to designing accessible websites. One major benefit is that many of the techniques that make a website work well with accessibility technologies such as screen readers also make it easier for search engines to index, increasing search rankings. There are downsides to creating accessible websites; few web designers are able to design sites that are both accessible and visually impressive. Many techniques commonly used to increase the visual impact of a site make it less accessible. In spite of the difficulties, an accessible website is a worthwhile investment.

Business websites should be designed with accessibility for the disabled in mind. Disabled users are potential customers, and an inaccessible website is likely to alienate them, as well as their friends and family members. The number of lost customers is likely to far exceed the number of disabled users who are actually unable to use the website. One of the major techniques for improving accessibility of websites for disabled users is simply following web standards. A standards-compliant site is more likely to work properly with assistive technologies such as screen readers and braille terminals, as well as browsers on devices such as cellular telephones, which are becoming increasingly popular with non-disabled users. Standards-compliant sites are also far less likely to require changes to remain compatible with future web browsers. (Holzschlag 2002) A common argument against standards-compliant, accessible sites is that they lack the visual appeal of nonstandard, inaccessible sites. As designers have grown accustomed to separating structure in the form of extensible hypertext markup language from visual presentation in the form of cascading style sheets, this argument has been shown to be false. (Shea 2005)

Designing accessible websites may involve more cost and time than inaccessible sites, especially if visual presentation is a major consideration. Common techniques used to improve a site's visual appeal can limit compatibility with assistive technologies. Macromedia Flash, for example can be used with a screen reader, but only under Microsoft Internet Explorer on Microsoft Windows. (Macromedia) Blind users often use web browsers that are fully text-based, under operating systems such as Linux which are highly-functional using a text-only user-interface, as opposed to Windows, which does not provide as functional an alternative to its graphical user interface. There are more web designers who can build nonstandard sites than standard ones. In fact, most websites fail HTML validation. Most graphical web design tools fail to produce output that is accessible or standards-compliant. Finding a web designer who is able to create a site that is visually attractive, standards-compliant and accessible may present considerable difficulty.