Law in Germany supports the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) sustained by official legislation in many countries around the world, too. Only that not many website owners are aware of its existence and they are even less aware of the existence of the Federal Ordinance on Barrier-Free Information Technology.

It’s maybe just because the ordinance is relatively new (April 2002).

Despite the valid legislation, many websites fail to comply. And this happens everywhere in the world, not only in Germany. The World Wide Web world. I am still amazed to see how little consideration webmasters show to the less fortunate users. Many website owners don’t even care. And I hear pretty often the question: “Come on, how many blind people really use the Web?”

What a dim-witted question! What narrow minds!

There are more blind people using the Internet than blind people reading Braille. For many reasons among which the fact that information on digital format is more accessible than in Braille format. You don’t have daily newspapers in Braille, but you do have daily news in digital format. And the blind people and people with serious visual imparities use screen readers to access the news. These people no longer need to wait till a relative or a friend makes time to read them the papers. The Internet has opened for people suffering of visual illnesses a new world of opportunities.

The moment we create sites that don’t comply with the most basic accessibility standards we hurt the rights of the users above. We hold them from accessing the information they need. We clutter their users’ experience. We do harm.

Another narrow-minded statement is “Google doesn’t validate, why should my site?”

• Firstly: valid HTML is not the warranty that the site is accessible. It is just a piece of the puzzle.
• Secondly: although it doesn’t validate, Google is more accessible than sites that already validate, but most importantly, Google likes accessible websites: check out the Google Accessible Search.

Now, it is really a mystery to me how Google determines what sites go in the search results of the Google Accessible Search, but when we compare the results versus the Google standard search we’ll notice that the sites that rank generally on the top of the traditional SERPs are also the ones ranking high in the accessible search. And because many of the sites don’t pass the W3C validity test, we can safely assume that Google is not using a HTML validator to determine accessibility.

Has Google included accessibility as a determinant ranking factor in its algorithm? Possibly.

• We know Google is testing a search option for people that need accessible websites.
• We know Google likes accessible websites.
• We know that Google is more accessible than many sites, without necessarily being W3C compliant.

Now I take my Web prophet role back and I predict that, if it didn’t do it yet, Google will include accessibility in its algorithms to measure the importance of a site and to rank it.

I am also inclined to believe that one day, just for the fun of it, the Google site will validate. That will end the W3C or non-W3C debates.

Truth being said, accessibility is an important issue.

People with disabilities are not a minority as many might think. They are our visitors, our clients, our business partners. Because we don’t see their faces and we almost never meet them in person we never know how difficult might be for these people to “walk” through our online store.

Imagine a disabled person having to make a real slalom among big rocks to reach to a novel on the highest shelf of your bookstore. Now come back to your site and take a look at how many needless obstacles you place in the way of a disabled visitor.

Needless ads clutter the pages, widgets no one really cares about show pretty avatars but never deliver any real traffic to your sites… A print preview of the site is a real nightmare! And the list goes on…