subject: Top 7 Reason To Website Accessibility Standards [print this page] It is one thing that you know whether disabled visitors comprise of a significant number of visitors to your website. However, following website accessibility standards holds much more importance to the performance of your website than you can imagine. Here, are 7 reasons why you should follow these standards.
The implemented on your website would not only make it accessible to the disabled users, but also to Google. It would help improve your organic rankings on search engines. When you ensure that there are appropriate ALT attributes for the images, explanatory TITLE tags and replacing inline markup with Cascading Style Sheets, your website would become easier for visitors with disabilities and it would also improve your rankings.
If you follow website accessibility standards, your site would become more accessible to a wider range of devices and browsers. For a user, there is nothing that can be more annoying that closing the regular web browser and revisiting a website through another one. If that is the case with your website, then you should know that in most cases, users dont visit such a site using another browser. Accessibility goes beyond accessing a site through the conventional browsers. Sites can be visited through cell phones, smart devices and even through RSS readers. In fact, mobile devices are growing at a very fast rate and you should keep this in mind when developing your website.
Follow the accessibility standards and you would be creating a website that is easier to manage. When a website is accessible, it would separate the content and the presentation of each page. There is an HTML document for every web page containing the words and images of that page. It is the CSS document that contains the information about the presentation. And, this document is shared between all the web pages. So, if your website has been designed keeping in view the accessibility standards, you would have to make changes in this CSS document whenever any layout adjustments are required.
An accessible website also means that it would be compatible with the latest browsing technologies. According to internet experts, the future of web access is more shifted to smart phones, PDAs and even in-car devices. And, these users are going to be high-net worth individuals with larger buying power. And, if businesses have to tap this highly potential segment, it would be required to create websites accessible to these new devices. Create a website following accessibility standards helps improve its downloading time. It has been found that accessible websites usually download at a faster rate as compared to those having poor accessibility. The percentage of broadband users is much less and if your site is going to take more than 10 seconds to load, there is a good chance that you would be losing prospective customers.
And, the seventh reason for following website accessibility standards is that it would help increase your websites usability. You should keep in mind that there is some relation between web accessibility and usability. It is also worth noting that redesigning websites keeping usability in mind helps increase conversation rates by as much as 100%.
