Image credit: Google Bot by Tyler Jordan

When thinking about website accessibility, what comes to mind is, how many blind, hearing impaired or otherwise disabled people are really going to visit my site? According to World Health Organization (Global Data On Visual Imparement For 2002), there are over 161 million visually impaired people in the world. That makes about 2.4% of the world population. Seems like a small number compared to over 6.5 billion of world’s population, to worry about designing the website to accommodate this particular need, considering that more than half of that 2.4% is in the third world countries and most do not even have access to the Internet to come and visit my site even if they wanted to.

Google is Disabled

What we do need to know is that there actually is a really important reason to make sure that every website addresses the accessibility issue. It is not just to make it easier for the disabled but to get better results in the search engines.

The biggest “disabled” user in the world is Google. Although Google’s bots are very intelligently programmed, they are still no match for an average human and therefore need to be accommodated for.

Feed The Bot

Google bots crawl though the web, running through the script of each page, recognizing navigation, links, images. When they visit, they have no clue as to what this website is about. This is why a website has a META TITLE and META DESCRIPTION tags, which should be descriptive. The rest of the page should have organized sections of content. A bot will distinguish one section from the other by looking for descriptive headlines. It tells where the main idea of the section is and where the sub-sections are by looking for tags like H1, H2, H3, and etc. respectively. It can not see the images so they need to be told what the image is by using the Alt information. It does not know where a link it finds will take it, so the link needs to be described or named with a title tag and anchor text. The flow of the website links should be organized so they don’t get confused.

Just like a visually impaired user, the bots will not see the fancy design, the cool graphical area separations a page has, they need to have organized, descriptive meta information embedded in a page. Keep this in mind the next time you build a site.

Accessibility Checklist

A checklist that I found in the WebDesigner magazine that helps keep on track while designing a site:

1. Use Alt information on your informational images. Images that are functional, like arrows, graphical headings and blocks of text.

2. Decorative images need to stay invisible.Keep the Alt information off the decorative images on the page so they do not confuse the bots.

3. Re-sizable text.The text on the site should be easily re-sizable.

4. Test your website in a text-only browser.If you take all the bells and whistles, will the site still be functional? A Linux browser called Lynx is one of many text-only browsers that you can check your site on. http://delorie.com/web/lynxview.html

5. Make sure you can easily Tab through the page’s links. Try browsing your website just by using Tab, Shift+Tab and Return keys.

6. Test your site with Wave. Wave is Web Accesibility Evaluation Tool .

“WAVE is a free web accessibility evaluation tool provided by WebAIM. It is used to aid humans in the web accessibility evaluation process. Rather than providing a complex technical report, WAVE shows the original web page with embedded icons and indicators that reveal the accessibility information within your page.”

Can you think of anything I missed?
Are you regularly keeping accessibility as one of your standards while building a website?