If you're new here, you may want to sign up for email alerts or to subscribe to my RSS feed.

Once upon a time the only way to create accessible websites was the dullest way possible: all text websites were considered the only acceptable in terms of accessibility. Images, animation and any other elements meant to increase the visual appeal of a website used to be treated as the number one enemies of Web accessibility.

The reality is that the Web has changed a lot during the past three-to-four years. New technologies make the creation of beautiful, interactive accessible websites a reality.

When you focus on accessible design from the first phase of your project you have all the possibilities of developing a website with web appeal, complex and dynamic, without facing any problems.

The browsers already provide the text resizing function to help users with poor eyesight read your message and benefit from what you have to offer. All you have to do is to design your website respecting Web standards that have been specially created to help you develop compliant websites.

In the past years, dynamic and graphically heavy sites needed to create text-only versions to compensate for the lack of accessibility to their main sites. But what they didn’t know back then is that text-only sites are not necessarily accessible sites.

For example, poor design makes navigation indistinguishable for people with cognitive disabilities.

Then there is the time consuming challenge of keeping both versions of the site up to date.

Now, with the new Web accessibility standards defined by WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) and the W3 Consortium Web standardization, creating accessible websites that are both visually appealing and usable is easy, fast and brings important advantages in terms of costs, content management and website updates.

Usability Is Not Accessibility

Web engineers (like Jacob Nielsen and many others) defined a series of standards to help designers develop usable websites. These standards are based on user characteristics, analysis and evaluation. The WAI standardization is simply a part of creating websites with better usability: easy to use, profitable and appealing.

When you plan a website, if you want quality, it is pointless to differentiate between usability and accessibility.

Usability problems don’t impact all users, while accessibility problems can be seen as discrimination against people with disabilities.

There are situational limitations to both usability and accessibility but if you follow the WAI standards and create a W3C compliant website, there shouldn’t be problems of high impact. W3C specifications are essential to permit access to the Web with any user device.

Accessibility Is Affordable

It doesn’t cost a lot to create an accessible site — not really, if you think that the price you pay in time, money and effort will pay off in the near future.

Start by making sure that you hire web designers able to design with W3C standards. Web designers should be able by now to create W3C compliant websites, and if they are not, simply hire those who are.

Take an example from real life: if you want to learn Spanish, you hire a teacher. Would you hire someone who doesn’t speak the language to teach you?

Programming valid HTML and CSS are not the sole faces of accessibility.

You’ll need to think at accessibility from a user’s perspective and the best way to do that is to involve users with disabilities in your project. If you don’t have the funds to hire these people, simply download aDesigner from IBM.

aDesigner is valuable to fix general accessibility problems faced by the visually impaired.

With this software the Web designers can actually simulate the Web experience of a visually impaired user due to the voice browsers and screen readers that read aloud the text on the site.

Please read the licensing agreement, but at the time of this writing, the software was free to download and use for internal purposes.

Implementing accessibility used to be expensive in the past, but now the Web is full of free tools to help you test your sites and produce quality. These tools are professional and reliable.

Visit the IBM Accessibility Research page to find free tools and links to important resources.

Test all your web pages with software that helps you identify potential accessibility problems and fix them. Cynthia is free, and so is WebXACT, and WAI provides a full and comprehensive list of free and paid software to help you test your website.

Accessibility Targets All Web Users

We don’t need accessible websites just to facilitate the access to Web content for the blind. Other impairments include auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, and neurological drawbacks.

Conduct your accessibility efforts with all these users in mind. Respect the WAI guidelines and you cannot go wrong. Many people believe that these guidelines are not enough. That’s false. The guidelines suffice to create an accessible website.

For example, to make the site accessible for people who are deaf all you need to do is to create text captions your video and audio files.

Deaf people will not be the only ones who benefit from this fix. Those who work in a quiet environment where playing audio is not allowed, or those who don’t have speakers to hear your audio files will not miss the information either.

Then, there is an SEO benefit too: as the search engines cannot “read” audio and video files, the caption will provide for the content they need to index these files properly.

Cognitive disabilities are easily addressed by creating websites with simple layouts and clear navigation. This helps people who have difficulties processing visual information too. New Web users will find the information they need faster, with less effort.

Remember the people who use low-bandwidth and older technologies and address the accessibility issues they might face:

• text and description of images for those who turn off images or who use text browsers;
• text captions for multimedia files that are too slow to download;
• effective CSS to separate content from presentation (decreases file size, increases download speed);
• good contrast between background and text.

Last but not least, design the website not to require the use of a mouse. Once again, this is not solely for the disabled. Web savvy surfers use keyboard shortcuts, people suffering from RSI (repetitive stress injury) often don’t use a mouse and people accessing your website from a mobile phone will benefit from this.

Take care of these aspects from the beginning of your project and you have the major potential accessibility problems in control.

Remember that accessibility means equal opportunity and there are situations when having an accessible website is required by law. Sooner or later the law will require all sites to be accessible, so by starting now you will avoid later expenses, which might prove to be higher than you expect.

Accessibility Is Your Responsibility

You cannot blame the web designer for not taking care of this aspect, you can eventually just blame them for errors in the HTML and CSS codes. That’s it.

If you want an accessible website you have to provide all possible information and support to help the designer: who are your users, how do they access your website, what is their age range, do they use mobile devices or other special software and hardware to navigate, and so on.

The basic answers for these questions are already known, but remember that each business has its own personality and its own public, so don’t expect it from the Web developer to create the perfect site for you just because you said: I want an accessible website for my online business.