Accessibility & Design
But what is accessibility and why should your business be concerned with it?
Most people consider accessibility issues as they pertain only to their disabled customers. Indeed, accessibility did begin with concerns for those individuals who are disabled in some way, be it blindness, deafness, physical handicaps, or more rare problems such as photosensitive epilepsy. However, accessibility is a much larger issue. An accessible website is one that is available to the largest possible audience, under the widest possible set of circumstances. This means that designers are not just developing websites for a select audience but must be aware of the potential problems facing all users.
A well designed and accessible website is not just usable by individuals with handicaps, but by those people limited by circumstance. Potential problems include web-enabled hand-held devices such as PDA's and cell phones, text-only readers, slow internet access, disabled scripting and graphics, out-dated computers, web browsers and operating systems, etc. By considering these problems at the outset of design, we are able to insure that your site is usable by everyone and that you will not be loosing potential customers due to a poorly designed website.
To check if your existing web site is to the Bobby Standard, paste your pages at Bobby Validation.