Accessibility & Web Standards
What are Web Standards?
In broad terms, Web Standards are the prescribed means of creating web pages to ensure that they display the most consistently and efficiently across all web browsers and devices. This includes hardware and software for people with a variety of physical and sensorial disabilities. More recently, it also includes mobile devices.
Web Standards ensure that your site is accessible to people with a large variety of devices, hardware and software. These standards have greatly improved access to the internet for people with a variety of disabilities.
This constantly evolving process is overseen by a range of industry players and specialists in the field operating as the World Wide Web Consortium.
What does it mean for you?
Web Standards mean more than accessibility to your site for people with disabilities. Here's some more advantages for owners of standards-compliant sites.
Improved search rankings
Using web standards and seperate style sheets simplifies the code on pages which are read by search engines. This permits more rapid and complete searches and the likelihood of standards sites achieving higher rankings.
Cheaper maintenance
By keeping page content and style code seperate, even radical changes to the appearance of websites is achieved in a fraction of the time that it takes for tables-based sites to be updated. This is because all content pages adopt their style from prescriptions on a single style sheet.
Greater accessibility & usability
By seperating style from text, screen readers are able to read standards sites with much greater fluidity. This enables vision impaired people to participate in the online world with greater ease. Tab-able browsing means that people with motor function disorders, paralysis, tetraplegia or amputatons can readily navigate standards sites.
Compliance with Equal Opportunity legislation
The world is changing. Not only legislatively, but also in terms of expectations. Enlightened society no longer considers it appropriate that the 15% of the population with disabilities or limited capacities is barred from participation due to thoughtlessness. Legislation reflects this in many nations, including Australia. Compliance is becoming an expectation which can no longer be ignored.
Increased market share
15% of Australia's population has some form of disability. Many of these impede the use of the internet. By including accessibility features in the construction of web sites greater numbers of partipants - ie. a broader share of the market - will be able to connect with your goods and services. Any way that you can grow your business increases your competitiveness. A broader customer base improves economies of scale, enhances word of mouth promotion and builds greater brand recognition.
Future proofing
The internet has been headed in this direction for some years and, in the last few years, the trickle has become a flood. Web standards are devised so that "reverse compatability" is built in, whilst current features can be quickly expanded upon in the future as they're part of an ongoing system.
Increasingly, "old school" tables-based sites are going to receive less support and less innovation, leaving the owners of these sites with higher costs all round, less market share and a bad look as they fail to keep up with community expectations.
View my Accessibility statement to learn more about the accessibility and useability features on this site.
