What is Website Accessibility?

A common misconception is that website accessibility is all about making your web site available to and usable by people with disabilities. To a small extent that is true but when it comes to web accessibility a person's ability or disability doesn't really come into it. What this is really about is making your website available to and usable by as many different media types as possible.

Let's think about this for a second. The internet is not only available through broadband on your spanking new Windows PC. What about dial-up users? What about those people with older operating systems and browsers? What about the 40% of users that don't use Internet Explorer? What about Mac and Linux users? What about the 10% of users that have JavaScript switched off? And let's not forget mobile technology...

Time and time again I come across websites that might look and work great in IE7 on Windows but take a look at it in Safari on a Mac and the site either displays incorrectly or just simply doesn't work.

As a developer I believe it is my duty to make sure that any site that I work on functions fully on as many different types of browser as possible, whether that browser is a screen reader or the latest version of Firefox. And it's really not that hard to do! Web Design, Web Development and Website Accessibility should all go hand-in-hand. You don't have to compromise on the design of your site to make it accessible. You don't have to compromise on the functionality of a site to make it accessible.

Put it this way, can you afford to alienate a potential 2% of your customer base because they prefer to use Opera instead of Internet Explorer? Can you afford to alienate the 2% of customers that use a Mac? Can you afford to alienate 10% of your customer base because your website is reliant on JavaScript? Probably not.

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