Accessibility

How can good accessibility help you?

Having a site that is user friendly is not only good for the visitor, it makes good business sense. It's not just about achieving the highest accessibility ratings, it's about making sure your site meets all of your visitors' needs.

This in turn means making sure you look at the site and the user experience from the visitors' perspective.

Good accessibility

Web site accessibility means allowing visitors to access your content without impediment. Guidelines are issued by bodies such as the Royal National Institute of the Blind, as well as enshrined in legislation such as the Disability Discrimination Act, with which all UK organisations must now comply. These define technical and presentation issues such as:

• Sufficient contrast between text and background
• Ability to re-size text

However, there are other good practice techniques, such as making links meaningful rather than the ubiquitous 'click here'. This helps an audio browser, which speaks the link titles to the site user.

Key benefits of implementing good accessibility practices

Apart from being a 'best of breed' site and being legally compliant, there are key practical benefits of implementing good web site accessibility practices:

• You are allowing a greater number of people access to your products and services. After all, why prevent people parting with their cash? It makes good business sense, especially if your site can be more accessible than your competitors'
• By making your content accessible, you remove technical barriers which makes it much easier to re-purpose your content for other platforms such as mobile phones, television and handheld devices

What next?

Contact NVisage for a free accessibility audit and to discuss how we can help:

• improve your user experience
• increase repeat visits
• convert more visitors to clients
• improve search engine rankings
• make your site legally compliant

All of the NVisage websites and products meet high standards of accessibility, including our ecommerce software and email newsletter

Recent client projects

• The National Council for Voluntary Organisations
• Dare Foundation