Effective
Web Design

Website accessibility is the practice of making websites usable to the majority of people around the world, especially to the people with disabilities. When the websites are designed keeping the accessibility factor in mind, it is mutually beneficial both for the company and its customers. Everyone has equal access to information and functionality. The providers benefit a lot in terms of increase in market share due to reaching out to more audiences. They have a better reputation in the market as compared to their competitors and also in a way demonstrate that they are more socially responsible and quite rightly so.

You can make your website more accessible by following the guidelines laid down by the World Wide Web Initiative available at http://www.w3.org/WAI/. This way you will focus on a larger portion of the population and cater to the needs of people with milder impairments, such as partial sight, poor hearing, and poor language skills. You will be amazed to find that the needs of this group can be accommodated by keeping in mind simple design tips. For example, for images and animations, you can use the Alt attribute to describe the function of each visual. Similarly, for multimedia, you can provide captioning and transcripts of audio and descriptions of video. The instructions which you choose should be clear and easy to follow.

Many organizations think that building in accessibility into their website is expensive and time-consuming procedure. This is a misconception. If they try and incorporate small changes in their websites on an on-going basis, then it would prove to be quite easy for them.

There are some things that you should never do while designing your website. If your website supports a couple of browsers, then success will sure elude you. The websites should be compatible with all the browsers available as you don’t know which customer will use which browser. If the website experience is not pleasant for the user, for example if the form you provided isn’t accessible, then you are bound to lose a potential customer. Such errors are quite prevalent but a little conscious effort can differentiate you from the average and help you establish your brand in the industry.

There is many resources on the Web that can help you improve you websites accessibility, for example you can check Jakob Nielsen’s Website.