25 January 2008
Your business has a website, it looks professional and you get a reasonable amount of clients through it. However, you might be losing potential customers because your site isn't accessible.

Make Your Site Accessible And Gain More Business

If you are a small business owner with an online presence, you want to get the maximum conversion rate possible from visitors to your site.
One of the forgotten issues that is overlooked by both site owners and web developers/designers is accessibility.
A common misconception is that for a site to be accessible, it must therefore be dull!
This just isn't true as most of the measures that make a site accessible have no effect whatsoever on users without disabilities/impairments.
There are certain best practices that apply to all sites if they are to be accessible for the majority of users. Here, I will list the top 5 techniques I use to ensure this.

Use alternative text for all images. This is useful for users who browse the web using screen readers/text browsers and is good for overall SEO too. The important thing to remember is to describe the image that can't be seen; don't put 'image1' for example.

Use title tags on all hyperlinks. Again, great for all screen readers and search engines. These can provide additional information to the user about the destination of the link and should be descriptive.

Use a 'skip to nav' button at the top of your site. This kind of link enables the user to bypass the navigation on each web page and takes them straight to the content of the page. Nobody wants to trawl through 10 identical navigation links on every page! This benefits both screen readers and keyboard users who tab through the content.

Use a high-contrast colour scheme. For people with visual impairments, the choice of background colours and text that you use on your site is crucial. If you are adamant that you want certain colours on your site, give your users an alternative through a separate stylesheet.

Limit the amount of scrolling that your users need to do (especially horizontally). By using relative measurements for your layout, you can ensure that the screen resizes according to the browser window without losing any of the content.

This isn't an extensive list but it is a step in the right direction when making your site as accessible as possible.