Accessibility—and why you should care.
Addison Hall Design considers accessibility to be an important component for all websites. The World Wide Web is a universal medium and should be available to anyone as long as they can get online. We do our best to keep up with the latest on the World Wide Web Consortium’s recommendations and accessibility guidelines and implement them with every website we build.
What is accessible website design?
So what does it mean to have an accessible website? Primarily it means that your website content is available to anyone, regardless of how they browse your website. For instance, visually impaired users must use a screen reader that speaks aloud what we normally read; and users that are unable to use a mouse or trackpad may navigate the web entirely by keyboard. There are, however, a couple of other nice benefits.
Search engines
Search engines view websites much like impaired users—all of the fancy layout and animations are ignored and they go straight for the content. And the more well-structured and accessible the site, the more search engines like them. That’s a very good thing.
Alternate browsing devices
One generally thinks of using a computer to access the internet, but more and more devices are being created to browse the world wide web. But consider the iPhone, the Blackberry, and even the Amazon Kindle—they all posses methods for browsing the internet, even if it is a little different from a typical computer. Accessible also means making your website available to as many web browsing devices as possible.
Building websites the “right” way
You may think there is a lot of extra cost involved with making a website this flexible, but not really. It’s simply a matter of using HTML as it was designed—valid, standards-compliant HTML. We make every effort to build all of our websites the “right” way, and our clients never even have to ask for it. We simply do it out of habit.
Here's more about valid HTML from the World Wide Web Consortium.