Why make an accessible website?

To put it very simply, accessible website design means making your website available to as many people as possible.

Many Governments around the world, including the Australian Government have now developed legislation that requires websites to be standards compliant and accessible by all web users.

To make an accessible website, the code must adhere to the standards set out by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), requiring proper semantics (the grammar, if you like) and seperating the structural (XHTML) and presentational (CSS) elements of the page.

This has many advantages in comparison to the 'old' methods of building websites.

Pages load faster

The presentational code is on an external style sheet that is referenced by all pages in the website and is downloaded only once. In comparison, previous methods would include, for example, the font size, font colour and font style 'inline' and attached each individual element of the page.

The reduction in the 'weight' of the page by only declaring a style once, in comparison to hundreds, maybe thousands, of times over an entire website is a considerable benefit to the visitors and the website owners by reducing the bandwidth.

Simplifying changes to your website

Cascading Style Sheets make editing webpages a far simpler process. Whereas changing the colour of, say, all the headings used to involve editing every heading on every page by hand, a time consuming task especially on larger websites, these changes can now be made on a site wide basis by altering just 6 characters!

Webpage Consistency

Cascading Style Sheets make it far easier to keep all the pages in your website consistent, sticking to the same theme. This naturally gives the website a more professional appearance, as well as avoiding any confusion to the visitor by suddenly changing styles when they load a new page.

Resizing text

This is probably one of the most commonly used and convenient advantages of designing to web standards.

The ability to resize all the text on your website, allows users with less than perfect vision to adjust the text to a size more comfortable for them to read.

Contrast

Contrast is very important to low-vision users. While there are endless possibilites for text colour and background combinations that can look great in print, reading some combinations on a monitor can be a struggle.

Screenreader Accessibility

Screenreaders can be used by people with very poor vision or full blindness, they literally read the text presented in the page aloud to your visitors. Presenting, just the information that is of interest to your visitors and excluding the style information, saves them time - which they will (silently) thank you for.

CSS also allows you to present the content of the webpage in an order that brings up the main information first (the interesting bit), followed by the navigation and lastly the (unimportant to blind people) images.

Search Engines

Following on from the ideas of presenting your webpage information in a 'content first' order and free of style information, also gives you a distinct advantage with most major Search Engines.

Search Engines use automated robots, called Spiders, to crawl the web and as there are billions of webpages out there for them to crawl, Spiders limit the amount that they 'read' from each page.

By offering them the main content of your page first, you get the advantage of them indexing more of the most important part of your website - the content!

These are just some of the many reasons and advantages of offering your visitors an accessible website - remember, the advantages are not just for them!