Is Accessibility Important?

According to U.S. Department of the Census, within the United States one in five people have some kind of disability and one in ten has some kind of sever disability. And 7.7 million people are blind within the United States. The Center for Disease Control states that 19% of people over the age of 70 have visual impairments and 1,100,000 people are legally blind according to the University of Washington Department of Ophthalmology. These numbers are only expected to grow as the baby boom generation becomes older and will soon become a substantial consumer segment.

Since June 2001, U.S. federal web sites must comply with section 508 of the Rehabilitation's Act. The law requires that agencies provide access to electronic information to people with disabilities. Section 508 identifies 16 specific standards for Web site accessibility. However, meeting these coding standards does not guarantee that your web site is accessible. It is also important that your web site is usable because if it's not usable it's not accessible even if it meets all section 508 requirements.

These federal guidelines are slowly seeking into the private sector. Recently, The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) recently filed an inaccessibility law suite against Target. "The suit charges that the site lacks, for instance, compliant alt-text, an invisible code embedded beneath graphics that allows blind users to decipher images. The suit also contends that because the Web site requires the use of a mouse to complete a transaction, blind customers are unable to make purchases on their own."

• Is your web site accessible? Need help analyzing the accessibility of your web site? See an example of an accessibility audit (pdf).
• Accessibility improves search engine visibility Learn about some of the secondhand benefits of an accessibly coded web site(pdf).

Other Benefits of Accessibility

Creating an accessible site has a better chance of yielding higher search engine priority, which can result in a tangible ROI. According to Jupiter "35 percent of organizations said SEO produces higher ROI than search ads and Consumers are 5 times more likely of purchasing a product after finding it from a web site through a search engine than through a banner ad.

Screen readers and search engines work in much the same way. They both rely heavily on content and work most efficiently when the content is separated from the presentation. To learn more about search engines and screen readers click here.

Designing for disabilities also benefits other types of users and devices. For example, when creating an application that will be used on a cell phone or PDA one may come across the same challenges as creating an interface for someone who has restricted physical abilities or is in a rural area with bandwidth limitations. When designing an application that may be used while driving a car one encounters the same challenges as designing an application for someone who is visually impaired. And when designing an application that might be used in a loud environment the designer must take into consideration the same issues as when designing for someone who is deaf. The solutions that are needed to solve these problems are common to the solutions needed for designing for users with disabilities. In the age of ubiquitous computing the designer should be thinking of these technologies and the challenges that are posed.