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Accessible Website Design - How To Make Your Website Accessible For Everyone

What is accessible website design?

Surely if Google and the other search engines can index your site, that means it's accessible?

Not really.

An accessible website design should be one that looks good for the majority of the population with good health but that it should also work fine for the hearing impaired and those with less than perfect eyesight (as just two examples of who you should be considering when you design your website).

One of the common "tricks" in website design is to use buttons for navigation. Switch the images off in your browser and see whether you can still navigate around your site?

Problems navigating?

This kind of problem won't just affect those who have eyesight problems. They'll also affect people on slow internet connections. Nowadays, this needn't be someone in the middle of nowhere. It could just as easily be a person at an airport, accessing the web with their mobile phone as the internet connection.

Does your website need Flash to get around?

Not only does this stop the search engines from indexing your site, it rules out a chunk of potential users. At the very least, offer people the choice of a Flash site and a non-Flash version. Then check your logs to see which they prefer - you may be surprised at the results, that will likely depend on the average age of your site's users.

It's easy to make a website design accessible. Little things help, like using regular menus rather than image buttons or Java menus. Or at least the option of one or the other.

Using "Alt" tags on will help your visitors who don't use images. It will also help tell the search engines what the images are about, so you get benefit in that direction as well.

Remember that a search engine's spider is the ultimate "impaired" person. It can't see. It can't hear. It can't use Flash or Javascript. All it can do is "read" the text on your page. So designing an accessible website will help your search engine optimization as well as your visitors with less than perfect health.