Accessibility vs Design

One topic that hasn’t been discussed here for a while, and can have an important role in SEO, is accessibility. If a website isn’t accessible for all users, it can not only lead to unhappy potential customers/clients, but can also lead to fines and restrictions on your website. However, accessible websites can often be quite boring and can affect visitor longevity and useability. Finding the right balance is therefore important and rewarding to the website owner and visitors.

When designing a new website, many designers and developers don’t bother to consider less able users who can represent a surprisingly large portion of your customer base (particularly the elderly, a large group with spendable income, who are becoming more computer literate and active in the online market place). They are also forgetting to consider that there has been recent government legislation recommending particular accessibility standards to adhere to, failure of which to do so can lead to bad publicity and even lawsuits.

In my experience the best way to ensure your website is accessible is to initially plan and build the website with simple core-features, making sure each one can be used in a completely accessible manner. An easy way of doing this would be to design the structure imagining that things like CSS, JavasScript and the like didn’t exist. Once this is done you can start to think about adding more advanced features out of JavaScipt, Flash, etc. to the accessible “base”. However, it is important you ensure that these “luxury” scripts are unobtrusive and will degrade gracefully.

In conclusion, if you make sure you follow the rules outlined by the Web Accessibility Initiative, you can rest assured your site can be viewed by the maximum range of web users. Once this is done you can then add the extra luxury features which can help to lead to longer user visits and increased conversions.

Rik
SEO Programmer