Design and Development
Accessibility and Standards compliance.
What is accessibility?
Accessibility means that your site is designed logically, thoroughly and with attention to detail when it comes to W3C standards.
Or put simply nearly a fifth of your potential audience, customers, clients have some sort of visual or physical impairment which makes it difficult to read a screen or use or mouse.
- An inaccesisible site shuts out that audience, is discriminatory, and depending on the nature and size of your organisation, illegal.
- An accessible and standard compliant site is also future proof and more likely to be useable on appiances other than computers - game consoles, smartphones, wap phones, set top TV boxes and handheld computers or PDAs.
- An accessible and standards compliant site makes for "leaner meaner code" - the more successful your site becomes, streamlined code and design saves you bandwith, whch saves you money.
It just does't make any sense not to make your site accessible and standards compliant. If you haven't already done so, you're competitor will, and may already be doing so!