Accessibility Review

Every visitor to your web site is a potential customer. Therefore it is vital that you make your web site as accessible to your visitors as possible.

Making changes to increase accessibility opens your pages to people with disabilities. It also broadens the appeal of your site by enabling it to be accessed with screen readers, PDAs, mobile phones and other new ways to visit the web. Making your web site more accessible will assist all users, and bring you new visitors.

Why make a web site more accessible?

There are a number of myths associated with producing accessible web sites. These include:

• building an accessible web site is expensive
• the number of people that can benefit from an accessible web site is small
• accessible sites look dull
• you need to provide a separate accessible web site

Accessible web sites simply do not need to be dull. In fact, there are some great looking sites that are accessible.

A few simple guidelines such as including alt-text for images, only using tables for structuring data and including an accessibility statement can make your web site more accessible. These changes need not be expensive and you don't need to completely revamp your existing site.

We perform an accessibility review of your web site focusing on questions such as:

• When displayed in a text reader, does each web page read sensibly?
• Is alt-text used for each image?
• Are hypertext links named well (eg not 'Click here')?
• Does the site include an accessibility statement?

We have produced several articles on web site accessibility including Some Guidelines for building a more accessible web site.