Accessibility; profit, ethic and moral combined?

In my last post i briefly mentioned accessibility on the web. I have long thought of this as a very powerful marketing argument and it's goodwill in the area of disabled people. It is not a very easy task to make a website totally accessible,(not the first time any way) whether it is built from scratch or an existing modified. Of course it depends a lot on what type of site you have and how it is built . If it is a content rich and informative site or more of a service oriented will make some difference. But in general, to build a site conforming to WCAG in full, will make the work more challenging. It will put a lot of focus on the way you build the client tier, i.e the pages with your markup. You will also to some extent, have to imaginatively put yourself in a position of e.g, someone who is blind or deaf. Fortunately there has been guidelines written, for how we shall create our web pages and make the content available to everyone. Even though these guidelines are extremely valueable for a developer, they don’t offer a solution in every situation.



Some of the disabilities a developer could be faced with writing code for.

1. Low Vision or complete blindness.
2. Colorblindness
3. Deafness
4. cognitive disabilities


And how could this be profitable? It could of course give you publicity. If your main target is to make your information and/or services available to the maximum amount of people. Use accessibility as one of your main marketing strategies, and spreading the word of your great site all over the place. You could write an e-book or post an article in some e-zine directory like ezinearticles, to market your site. You should have a much bigger chance to get publicity in articles on the internet, magazines etc and to get inbound links. I cannot recall having seen any website using this argument, besised Accessibilty tutorials etc. That is probably because there are so many poorly written websites out there. The pages written in a website, must be well structured. When writing a page, the creator must have the disabled peoples assistive tools in mind and write the markup thereafter and of course follow the WCAG. According to my experience, they rarely do.



I will continue to write about Web Accessibility and the business around it. I am pretty convinced that it could boost marketing results, if the web site is implemented and marketed in a good way.


/Daniel