"An accessible website means all consumers can access your goods and services."
Fully Accessible
Care has been taken to ensure this website has been written in a way that provides the highest level of accessibility.
What is website accessibility?
Some Web technologies, if used incorrectly, can be detrimental for people accessing the content on your site. Ensuring your website is accessible means everyone can consume the information you have on your site. This means everyone has access to your goods and services. Great!
The W3C, the Web council, produce recommended guidelines on accessibility that should be adhered to.
Why is website accessibility important?
Website accessibility is generally assumed to be about access for people with disabilities but access can mean much more than that. Look at some examples below of what accessibility means from a users perspective.
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A user cannot access your websites information because there are far too many resources such as images, or perhaps audio on the requested page. This means the page is not loading properly, if at all, unless you have a very fast internet connection. This presents an accessibility problem for people not on broadband which is a significant proportion of your buying market.
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A hard of hearing user cannot access a special offer of 30% off your goods because the offer is provided by an advert that has audio describing what to do to qualify.
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A partially sighted visitor cannot understand how to access the rest of your website because the text in the images that represent your navigation does not expand and the contrast is low making them very difficult to use.
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A search engine cannot access the text on your website because it's contained within images and the alternate text isn't clearly defining the meaning.
As you can see, accessibility needs a lot of consideration. The aim is to give everything and everyone the opportunity to access your content so there's as much access to your goods and services as can be.
Test your website
You can run your website through an automated Web service which gives an initial overview to how accessible your website is but it's preferred to be check against the guidelines manually and this may require specialist assistance.