Usability and accessibility - the fundamentals

Accessibility and usability are fundamental to a website. It is essential that any visitor to your website can access all that they need to the best of their ability. An over-complicated, 'clunky' site will result in visitors who won't stay for long and definitely won't return. You should also ensure that they are able to easily navigate around the site, know where they are and wherever possible be only one click away from the home page.

If you are looking for website usability and accessibility consultants then get in touch.

Navigation and design should assist the visitor, not be there for design's sake. You should reduce barriers to entry and observe best practice usability procedures such as:

• Allow text to be resized using browser preferences
• Consistant linear navigation
• Appropriate use of text ALT tags on images
• Follow guideleines such as from RNIB, Bobby, meeting the requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guidelines (Level 2)

With regard to technological accessibility we always develop websites to internationally recognised standards. This means observing the appropriate screen resolution to account for widest accessibility and to allow ease of printing, book-marking and search engine indexing. For this reason we strongly advise against using frames and technology that may not be widely available. It should also be noted that some features are commonly disabled by business networks which can hinder accessibility of the site if they are relied upon. This can include extensive client side scripting such as JavaScript or DHTML. As well as falling foul of some business networks, these technologies can put more barriers in front of both users, thereby reducing usability and also search engines thereby reducing search engine visibility.

Usability issues include the way that copy is written to take account of the different abilities of your users. We always advise on restricting the amount of information on key pages and section Home pages to that which sits "above the fold", i.e. that which will be visible on the majority of user's screens. We will provide advice upon this and appropriate guidelines for writing good web copy.

If you are interested in other aspects of web development such as how to choose a good search engine optimisation company then we are here to help.