There was a story about a restaurant in Hamilton Ontario, if memory serves correctly it was a Greek restaurant but the details seem reasonably unimportant. In this story, a man is hired to build a wheelchair ramp for the restaurant and he brings his young son along to help.

The boy was confused because the owners didn’t need to use wheelchairs and so he asked his father why they choose to spend the money on putting in an expensive ramp. His father then explained that the ramp wasn’t for the owners but it was for the customers. Still confused, the boy pointed out that not a lot of people used wheelchairs and his father, always patient agreed yet also pointed out that since there was only one restaurant in town that was inviting to people in wheel chairs, they would all eat here.

Regardless of your business, the web is not unlike the restaurants of Hamilton in that there are not a lot of people with visual impairments yet those few websites which make the effort to accommodate them, get all their business.

Helping the Visually Impaired View Your Website

When creating a website, it is vital to remember not all your audience members have the physical or technological capacity to see the web the same way you do. In fact according to the American Foundation for the Blind, roughly one in ten people suffer from significant loss of vision. That means that over 30,000,000 Americans have difficulties reading poorly designed websites.

Building better websites to help an aging population, as well as those who simply lack modern computers (15% of people surfing our websites use computer monitors of 800×600 pixels or less) is easy if you take the time to follow some basic tips:

1. Ensure all images are properly labeled using the ALT attribute
2. In an image is used as an interactive element, describing the function of the element
3. Provide captions for multimedia elements such as audio, video and rich media
4. Use verbose text links, avoid using “click here” whenever possible
5. Use CSS structure for design and W3C compliant layouts for websites
6. Make the most of lists and headings to help identify key elements
7. Summarize charts, graphics and images with the longdesc attribute
8. Avoid unnecessary scripts, frames and applets

How Helping the Blind will Help Build Your Business

While ensuring that people with disabilities have free and easy access to your website should be motivation enough to build a great website, there’s a wonderful side benefit for modern companies which should never be overlooked, Google.

Over the past decade, Google has dominated the online search market and is responsible for two thirds of all searches in the world, that’s over 6,000,000,000 (six billion) searches per month for 2009 and the titan of search engines shows little sign of stopping. The objective of every business with a website is to appear in the coveted top of a Search Engine Result Page (SERP) to drive more traffic to their website site but to understand how this is accomplished, a basic understanding of Google is required.

At the very core of what makes Google capable of delivering such great search results is a small software application called a spider. These spiders are constantly crawling the web, searching for new content, indexing pages and reporting back to Google with the most updated information possible and these spiders, are blind. Therefore, if you want to help Google drive traffic to your website, it is imperative that your website effectively be readable by people with visual difficulties. With that in mind, let’s take another look at why out simple steps to helping the visually impaired are important to Google and other major search engines:

1. Ensure all images are properly labeled using the ALT attribute
   this allows search engines to know what a specific photo contains and focus the page relevance as well as return results on the Images search engine
2. In an image is used as an interactive element, describing the function of the element
   this allows Google to transfer the description from the element to the target page which increases the visibility of the link in Google’s results
3. Provide captions for multimedia elements such as audio, video and rich media
   Google is unable to view the contents of interactive rich media such as Flash or audio files, the caption is Google’s only way of knowing what the file is about
4. Use verbose text links, avoid using “click here” whenever possible
   Google uses the hyperlinked words to help determine what a link is about, for example linking the phrase Fredericton web design to our homepage  helps the search engine understand which keywords we want to promote
5. Use CSS structure for design and W3C compliant layouts for websites
   At their core, a webpage is nothing more than a computer document just like a Microsoft Word file but readable by web browsers. Similar to Word documents, these files must be compatible with the software reading them or problems occur and in the case of webpages this file format is defined by the W3C standard. If you want Google and other search engines to be able to read your website, you need to comply to these standards.
6. Make the most of lists and headings to help identify key elements
   When a person looks at a webpage, some words appear bold or larger. These elements help us see when words and phrases are important, similarly search engines use heading tags and formatting elements to assign importance to phrases
7. Summarize charts, graphics and images with the longdesc attribute
   As with all graphics,  spiders are unable to read the content of a photo or chart.
8. Avoid unnecessary scripts, frames and applets
   While  helpful for displaying information to 90% of the audience, frames, scripts and applets make surfing the Internet almost impossible for the visually impaired as well as major search engines.

Ensuring your website is optimized for both search engines and the visually impaired is just one of the many services offered by Ross Creative, if your business would like an Accessibility Report completed on a web property please contact our web strategy team today.