Accessible Web Design for maximum audience levels

Accessibility or as we at Atomic Web Solutions prefer to refer to it – Usability is the procedures implemented to ensure that a web site is available to the largest audience possible.

Many people who wish to use the products or services made available via your web site may not be able to access the information or products because the web site excludes them - possibly because the font used is too small and they cannot read the text for example. 

Partially sighted or Visually blind users can still access a web site if some simple procedures are used to assist their text reading equipment, such as ensuring that all images have Alternate Text for example.

Ensuring that background and font colours contrast and that text can be resized as required assists users with sight problems or colour blindness.

Ensuring that images used on a web site are optimised in terms of file size allows pages to load and display in acceptable time for those users with old technology or slow Internet connection speed.

All of these procedures take little time and effort to achieve if planned into the design and functionality of a web site.  Going back and adding these facilities to a previously developed web site is not so straightforward though.  The moral of the story is therefore to design with accessibility or usability in mind.

Since 1999, the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) made it law that web sites offering goods and services to the public must comply with accessibility standards. Some large organisations have already fallen foul of the act and been fined large sums of money for not ensuring that their site is accessible.

Apart from not adhering to the DDA, a web site that is not accessible could lose you a lot of business.  There are 10 million disabled people in the UK with a discretionary income of approximately £50 billion per year, so why exclude them.  Accessible web sites are also by design, much better for search engines to index, so you are likely to get much larger numbers of visitors.

The tool often used to test and benchmark a web site for the accessibility is called Bobby and sites are graded into three levels of accessibility:

• Bobby 1 (A) – fundamental levels of accessibility
• Bobby 2 (AA) – Good level of accessibility (Out of Interest most of the pages of www.rnib.org.uk - Royal National Institute for the Blind web site achieve this level)
• Bobby 3 (AAA) – The highest level of accessibility (Most of the pages in the Atomic Web Solutions web site conform to Bobby AAA standard, so you can see that accessibility doesn’t make for a bland web site)