Make Your Site Accessible to Millions

Did you know that a lot of websites out there turn away 47 million people in the U.S. and miss out on a niche market? It’s true! More than one trillion dollars in spending power is getting forgotten about for just one simple reason.

Their website is not accessible to people who have disabilities

That’s right. If you make your website accessible to people with disabilities you will be opening the door on a new market of over 47 million people out there. According to the U.S. Census Bureau over 47 million people in the United States have disabilities, 73% of people with disabilities are heads of households, and $13.6 billion is spent on 31.7 million trips made by people with disabilities.

Do you lose a customer when a person with disabilities visits your site because the readers that they use or the colors of the site make it impossible to use it? Did you know that Google has an accessible web search for the visually impaired? It can be found at Google Laboratories over at http://labs.google.com/accessible/.

Imagine what it would be like if Google developed a search engine that only allows accessible websites. That would narrow down the list in a hurry! If you want an overview of accessible solutions from Google you can check it out at http://labs.google.com/accessible/overview.html.

Here are some problems that people who have disabilities face when visiting a website.

• Certain color combinations prevent them to seeing the web site properly
• Readers are not able to pick up text that is used in images
• No ease of navigation of site for people that cannot use a keyboard or mouse
• Tables used on websites can be a problem for readers to read in the right order
  

You can avoid missing out on all of these customers or even possibly avoid a lawsuit by structuring your website by certain guidelines.

Here are some ideas that can be done to make your website more accessible.

• Have proper alt tags for all images on your website. (I don’t mean keyword stuffing the alt tags.)
• Make sure the tables in your website are set up so that readers can read it for the disabled in the right order.
• Make use of quick keyboard shortcuts to navigate the pages easily.
• Add the "longdesc" attribute to images to direct people to a text based description of the images if an alt tag is not enough.
• Keep in mind while designing your site that people may be using screen readers, voice browsers, and screen magnifications to view your site with.
• Add ‘Skip over Navigation’ links to make it easier to skip over sections of a website.
• Make sure you use accessible .html forms and .pdf forms.
• Use default font types rather than specific fonts.
• Use relative font sizes and try to avoid specifying exact font sizes.
• Be careful how you use JavaScript on a page.
• Make sure each page has a meaningful element to describe the page.
• Don’t use font colors that do not contrast well with the page background. You can test out your website at http://colorfilter.wickline.org/.
• Limit Flash usage to trivial stuff.
  

If you do use Flash as a rule of thumb the newer the version the more likely it will be able to make an accessible website. You can provide text equivalents to portions of your Flash program to help people with disabilities.

Why should you make your website accessible?

• You can gain a niche of over 54 million buyers that most other websites do not even take into consideration.
• Increase your revenue.
• It may become the law. It is already a law for government sites and many state sites.And for the most important reason . . . BECAUSE IT IS THE RIGHT THING TO DO!
  

This post provided by Michael Rock who founded The Internet Presence (http://theinternetpresence.com) on 7/11/2003 where you can learn how to make your own website and offers SEO Consultation services at http://rocksolidseo.com.