Benefits Of An Accessible Website: Part 1 – Increase In Reach
Source: Flickr
The DDA (Disability Discrimination Act) specifies that provider need to not victimize disabled individuals. A site is regarded as a service and therefore falls under this law, and as such have to be made available to everyone.
Some organisations are making accessibility enhancements to their sites, but many are seemingly not making the ease of access adjustments. Disabled individuals do not access their website, they say, so why should they care?
Why you should care about handicapped Internet users
The stats on the variety of users who might face difficulties due to your website’s ease of access are quite surprising:
* There are 8.6 million signed up disabled people in the UK – 14 % of the population (source: DRC).
* One in 12 men and one in 200 ladies have some type of colour loss of sight – 9 % of the UK population (source: Institution of Electrical Engineers).
* 2 million UK residents have a sight problem – 4 % of the population (source: RNIB).
* There are 12 million people aged 60 or over – 21 % of the UK population (source: UK government).
Although there is unavoidably some overlap between the abovementioned groups, building up these numbers provides an overall of 48 % of the UK population that could possibly face issues with your website’s availability. That’s an extraordinarily high number.
It’s not simply disabled users who cannot access your website.
Non-disabled individuals may also experience difficulties with your site’s availability. Not everybody is seeing your website on the most recent variation of Web Explorer, with all the plug-ins and programs that you may require them to have for ideal access.
If your website relies on images, Flash or JavaScript, and fails to offer alternatives, then your site won’t be accessible to a number of web users. The copying are a common incident:.
* Users on sluggish connections routinely turn images off to enable a quicker download time. Some web browsers, such as the text-only Lynx web browser do not show images at all.
* Not every user has actually downloaded the most recent Flash program that’s needed to access your website. Additionally, the download time on Flash sites commonly takes so long that users lose persistence and do not even wait to see the material. Just 25 % of web users in the UK are linked to the Web through broadband (source: National Statistics).
* JavaScript is a scripting language that can cause changes to a page, often through mouse functions, buttons, or other actions from the user. For example, pop-ups are opened utilizing JavaScript. JavaScript is unsupported by about 5 % of web users, either since they have turned it off to prevent pop-up adverts or since their browser does not support it (source: The Counter). Any JavaScript-driven content provided on your website will not be easily accessible to these users.
* PDAs, mobile phones and WebTV have restricted support for big images, Flash and JavaScript. You can check your site by downloading the free WebTV audience. You can also inspect how your website looks on a cellphone with the Wapalizer. Do not undervalue the importance of this: in 2008 alone an approximated 58 million PDAs will be offered (source: eTForecast) and one third of the world’s population will own a cordless device (source: ClickZ).
