Accessibility is all about opening up your web site to the widest possible audience
You might access web sites through Firefox or Internet Explorer. Not all people do. Not all things that access web sites are people.
Web sites are accessed:
- using web browsers, such as Firefox, Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer
- by search engine crawlers
- using mobile phones, specifically 3rd generation phones with colour screens
- using screen readers and braille browsers, by people with disabilities
Making a web site accessible to all goes beyond simply considering people with disabilities. The more accessible your web site, the more people will be able to access it and the more services, such as Google, will be able to direct people towards it.
Benefits of an acccessible web site
In short, the more accessible your web site the more money it will make.
More visitors
More than 90% of your web site's visitors will use a regular web browser. Opening up your web site further will get you 10% more visitors. More visitors always equals more income, making accessibility improvements a wise investment.
Greater search engine visibility
Search engine crawlers, such as Googlebot, visit web sites and index what they find.
The more accessible your web site, the more can be found by search engine crawlers and the more they can index. The more of your content is indexed, the more your web site will turn up in search results. The more your web site turns up in search results, the more visitors you will get. It's as simple as that.
Consider also that a search engine crawler is the ultimate blind person - just a computer program that reads and interprets the text on your web site without being able to see any of it.
Making your web site fully accessible to search engine crawlers then also makes it accessible to people with little or no eyesight. If you can't financially justify improvements for visually impaired people, consider instead the increase in revenue resulting from greater search positioning.
Reduced hosting costs
A web site designed for wide accessibility will have lighter pages. That is, the pages will take less space to store at your web host and will take less bandwidth when being sent to visitors.
Web site storage space and bandwidth cost money. The lighter your web pages, the lower your hosting costs.
Improving your web site's accessibility
I will improve the accessibility of your web site through analysing it and identifying any shortcomings and will give you a free summary of the most critical issues.
Detailed reports can be ordered highlighting accessibility issues and suggesting solutions. You may then choose us, or indeed anyone else, to implement the solutions for you.
Please get in touch if you are interested in talking about this further.