Planning for Access: How You Benefit
September 12th, 2006Access Serves You
Having trotted out the rationale behind many site owners’ sudden interest in accessibility, let me hastily add that fear of lawsuits is the wrong reason to incorporate access into your design practice. These enhancements open any site to new visitors and whose site could not use more visitors? Those locked out of other sites will be inclined to feel quite loyal to yours if you welcome them into it by making these adjustments to your markup.
If other online stores block disabled visitors and nontraditional device users and your store welcomes them, guess who will be selling to those customers, and guess who won’t be?
And don’t forget, the more accessible your site is to disabled visitors and nontraditional internet device users, the more available its content will also be to Google, AlltheWeb, and all the other crawler-driven search engines and directories that send visitors your way. Conversely, the less accessible your site, the less traffic it will draw from Google and its brothers.
Zeldman.com, A List Apart, and most sites designed by Happy Cog over the past few years rank highly in search engine results, not because we’re doing anything fancy, but because these sites are built with access-enhanced semantic markup.
Golly, I was trying to attain higher moral ground, and I still seem to have offered purely self-interested reasons for implementing accessibility.
Here are two more:
Implementing access enhancements can deepen your understanding of “design.” Considering things like tab order can take you beyond a vision of design as the decoration of surface appearance (”look and feel”) and into the realms of user experience, contingency design, and general usability. These are issues that web designers, information architects, and usability specialists think about anyway. Accessibility is just another aspect of considering how to best build our sites to meet diverse human needs.
Implementing access and honing a conformance strategy can sharpen your development skills and provide fresh perspectives you might never have considered otherwise. Learning the ways of WAI and the particulars of 508 (or any other legally defined access standard) will increase your value as a professional web designer, position your web agency as smarter and more clued-in than its competitors, and help your sites reach more people than ever before.
That is what every site owner wants and what every designer or developer strives for. Practicing accessibility will help your visitors reach their goals, yes; but it will also help you reach your own.