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Benefits Of An Accessible Website: Part 1 - Increase In Reach
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Trenton Moss July 24, 2006
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Trenton Moss |
This article was written by Trenton Moss. He's crazy about web
usability and accessibility - so crazy that he went and started his own
web usability and accessibility consultancy ( Webcredible - http://www.webcredible.co.uk ) to help make the Internet a better place for everyone.
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Trenton Moss
has written 3 articles for JavaScriptSearch. |
View all articles by Trenton Moss... |
The DDA (Disability Discrimination Act) states that service
providers must not discriminate against disabled people. A website is
regarded as a service and therefore falls under this law, and as such
must be made accessible to everyone.
Some organisations are
making accessibility improvements to their websites, but many are
seemingly not making the accessibility adjustments. Disabled people
don't access their website, they say, so why should they care?
Why you should care about disabled Internet users
The statistics on the number of users who may face difficulties due to your website's accessibility are quite startling:
* There are 8.6 million registered disabled people in the UK - 14% of the population (source: DRC)
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One in 12 men and one in 200 women have some form of colour blindness -
9% of the UK population (source: Institution of Electrical Engineers)
* Two million UK residents have a sight problem - 4% of the population (source: RNIB)
* There are 12 million people aged 60 or over - 21% of the UK population (source: UK government)
Although
there is inevitably some overlap between the aforementioned groups,
adding up these numbers provides a total of 48% of the UK population
that could potentially face problems with your website's accessibility.
That's an extraordinarily high number.
It's not just disabled users who can't access your website
Non-disabled
people may also experience difficulties with your website's
accessibility. Not everyone is viewing your website on the latest
version of Internet Explorer, with all the plug-ins and programs that
you may require them to have for optimal access.
If your website
relies on images, Flash or JavaScript, and fails to provide
alternatives, then your website won't be accessible to a number of web
users. The following examples are a common occurrence:
* Users
on slow connections regularly turn images off to enable a quicker
download time. Some browsers, such as the text-only Lynx browser do not
display images at all.
* Not every user has downloaded the
latest Flash program that's needed to access your site. Additionally,
the download time on Flash websites often takes so long that users lose
patience and don't even wait to see the content. Just 25% of web users
in the UK are connected to the Internet via broadband (source: National
Statistics).
* JavaScript is a scripting language that can cause
changes to a page, often through mouse functions, buttons, or other
actions from the user. For example, pop-ups are opened using
JavaScript. JavaScript is unsupported by about 5% of web users, either
because they have turned it off to prevent pop-up adverts or because
their browser doesn't support it (source: The Counter). Any
JavaScript-driven content provided on your website won't be accessible
to these users.
* PDAs, mobile phones and WebTV have limited
support for large images, Flash and JavaScript. You can test your
website by downloading the free WebTV viewer. You can also check how
your website looks on a mobile phone with the Wapalizer. Don't
underestimate the importance of this: in 2008 alone an estimated 58
million PDAs will be sold (source: eTForecast) and one third of the
world's population will own a wireless device (source: ClickZ)
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