EXPERT ADVICE Be open to
he internet has revolutionised our lives. We now take it for granted that we can buy and sell in an instant, 24 hours a day. But in the rush to get your message out don’t forget to give some thought to ensuring that your offer can be accessed by everyone.
Making sure that people with a disability can work their way around your site brings with it a number of advantages. It’s the right thing to do, it will make your team feel good about themselves and it will enhance the reputation of your brand. But if you think that sounds a bit soft and fluffy, there are also some really concrete business benefits and requirements. Search engines will index your site much more efficiently. There are 11m people in the UK registered with a disability, that’s 17% of the population, a very significant proportion of the market, and there’s also the 2010 Equality Act which says services have to be accessible to people with a disability.
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Websites are essential business tools for virtually every business. But what if the visitor can’t see too well, or hear the clever dialogue on your expensive video? You might be turning away valuable customers. Léonie Watson, director of accessibility and web development at Nomensa, has some words of wisdom.
If you have videos on your site, you may need to have text to go along with it. That can be done in various ways, such as a captions button or the facility for a text description of videos and pictures. The way all this helps search engine optimisation is that while material in audio or visual form cannot be identified, search engines do recognise descriptions in text form. Therefore, by helping people with a hearing impairment you are actually doing something which will improve your search engine ranking.
Make sure the site can be navigated using only key strokes and not just by a mouse. There are many devices, such as eye tracking, speech recognition, sip and puff, which allow people with quite severe disabilities to access the internet. It’s important to be certain that the tab key allows a viewer to work their way through the dialogue boxes.
‘Think about the people viewing your
site.Are they hard of hearing, have some element of sight impairment or are they just viewing it on a very small screen?’
The prospect of making your website truly accessible might sound a bit daunting, but there are agencies who can help. Most fundamental is to ensure that accessibility is considered at an organisational level within your business and you come up with some good answers to questions such as who is responsible, how do you measure success, and is it part of your regular business operation? When it comes to the website, some of the work is fairly obvious. Think about the people viewing your site. Are they hard of hearing, have some element of sight impairment or are they just viewing it on a very small screen such as a mobile phone?
There are other ways to make your site and the material on it more accessible. PDFs can be tagged behind the scenes so they look on the screen just the way they were designed. However, people using access technologies to view your information will really notice the improvement. All the original features of your original form, including online complete, save and send functionality will be retained but people who don’t use a mouse can complete your PDF forms successfully.
Media players can present your multimedia content on a platform that matches the same level of accessibility as the rest of the site, allowing users to switch between audio and video interfaces and work with smaller screen sizes. Display synchronised captions can be available at the touch of a button. It’s possible to measure accessibility and there are global benchmarks such as Levels A, AA, or AAA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. In the UK the Government expects the AA standard as the norm for all public bodies. There are 63 checkpoints for different disabilities which include things like ensuring that colours provide good contrast, that the structure of pages is logical, well spaced and with clear links.
When you come to think about it, making your website accessible for people with a disability isn’t just something that’s nice to have, it actually makes complete sense for the good of your business.
Business West Update SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 21
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