Is Your Website Breaking The Law?
Posted on 23. Sep, 2009 by Lyz in blog, web accessibility
Have you heard of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) and do you know that part of it refers directly to websites and that those that don’t comply are breaking the Law? Not only that but you’re missing out on a huge audience of potential online customers – compliance with the guidelines brings other unexpected benefits too.
I know for a fact that investing in a website that complies with accessibility standards is money well spent. The guidelines are developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) under the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) to ensure that web content is available to, and accessible by, the largest possible audience – regardless of disability. A website accessible to all hugely increases the chances of your company doing business online – suddenly your website content can be seen by a whole new group of web surfers including those on mobile phones.
Another Benefit of Web Standards Compliance
Over the years I have become increasingly interested in search engine optimization (some may say obsessed) and have researched and tested many techniques to propel my clients’ websites up Google’s rankings. Never an easy task, but one method that gives consistently outstanding results is building an accessibility standards compliant website. It seems that by coding pages that are friendly to users with disabilities you also make it friendly to search engines.
It’s actually not so strange when you think about it; the accessibility standards provide a way to separate style from content. The content appears in its rawest form on the web page and an external file called a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) controls how and where all that information appears.
A search engine is not concerned with what a page looks like visually; it can’t read text within images and it can’t view video files. These are exactly the problems that the accessibility guidelines seek to solve so it’s not so hard to understand why a web standards complaint website would be favoured by search engines over one that is not.
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