A website provides a window into your business, your products or services and your people, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Nowadays, one of the first places people look when locating a product or service is the internet, either via search engines like Google or by using a directory like Yell.com. Outside normal trading hours, a potential customer can determine whether or not you can supply what they want.

But what if your potential customer is disabled? Having gone to the trouble of developing a website, it is essential that it is open to all – including internet users who are disabled.

It is too easy to assume that it is only blind users who must be considered. Although a large portion of accessibility considerations are targeted at sight-related disabilities, there is also a need to consider hearing disabilities, mobility, learning difficulties and technology-related issues.

It is no good developing a site with all the latest features if it cannot be viewed and enjoyed by all potential internet users. The addition of features that rely on video or audio to deliver a message will mean that unsighted or deaf users will not be in a position to appreciate them, so alternative ways of providing the information need to be employed.

It is important to recognise that making your website accessible to all is a legal requirement under the Disability Discrimination Act. Any company that

provides services through the internet is required to make a reasonable effort to make the service accessible – and that includes everything from a simple information website through to an online ticketing service.

It also makes good business sense to cater for internet users with disabilities as there are more than two million UK users with visual impairment and another six million who suffer from another form of disability. All of these people are likely to be using the internet to carry out research or to buy online, so they will use the sites that they find to be the easiest.

Guidelines have been published by the World Wide Web Consortium, which provides developers with information on how to make websites accessible.

  • Priority one: This is the minimum level of accessibility that all websites should adopt and ensures that at least some disabled users will be able to access your site.

  • Priority two: This should be the target level that developers and website owners should be achieving, as it provides for a much wider target audience.

  • Priority three: This provides for the greatest level of accessibility and should be considered by high traffic sites whose audience is highly likely to include a range of disabled users.

    It is worth noting that although these guidelines attempt to cover a wide range of disability issues, it is important to provide a means by which a user who experiences problems can contact you. By doing this, you will be seen as a proactive company that embraces its disabled web users.

    There are a few simple suggestions that you can follow to improve your website’s accessibility, such as ensuring that the text size is not fixed, or that the colour scheme used will work on black and white monitors and that it is suitable for the colour blind.

    To ensure that your site is meeting the minimum requirements, we would recommend that you read the accessibility guidelines at www.w3c.org in more detail.

    Alternatively, for a modest fee, many web development companies will undertake a site review, to help identify areas that might need attention.

    TRADA Technology is able to provide a site review service that takes into account accessibility requirements, as well as providing feedback on the current state of your website.