2 July 2009
The Web is an important resource in many aspects of life: education, employment, government, commerce, health care, recreation, and more. It is essential that the Web be accessible in order to provide equal access and equal opportunity to people with disabilities.

The statistics on the number of users who may face difficulties due to website accessibility are quite startling:

-There are 400,000, or 1 in 10 registered disabled people in Ireland – 9.7% of the population
-8% of men and 1% of women have some form of colour blindness
- There are 813,167 people aged 60 or over – 19.5%

Although there is inevitably some overlap between the aforementioned groups, adding up these numbers provides a total of 38% of the Irish population that could potentially face problems with website accessibility. That's an extraordinarily high number.
Making a website accessible isn’t a daunting task and is one that can be implemented in stages....isn’t the potential of a new 1.2 million strong customer base worth making it a priority for your website?