Web Accessibility & Usability
Are you losing out on your share of £120 billion?
Would you run a print campaign that a significant proportion of your audience could not access or understand? No?
So why do it online?
According to the latest research by the Disability Rights Commission, currently 8 out of 10 UK websites are shutting out 20% of the UK population who have communication difficulties. The campaigners say that inclusive and accessible communication will unleash the £120 billion per annum spend that this 20% have to offer UK business.
At Dunning Design, we can help improve the accessibility of your website, which could easily help increase traffic and profits.
So what is an accessible website?
An accessible website means making it available to all.
Gone are the days when websites were looked at just with a PC. Today, websites are viewed on PCs, laptops, palmtops, digital TVs and all sorts of mobile devices. They are viewed by non-human automated systems or robots, and are read aloud by special software to the visually impaired.
If your site cannot be used by all these browsers, you are reducing your audience, and it is not a small minority you are losing.
How does accessibility work?
The essence of accessibility is to put the content of a web page first and the design second.
For example, if you want to find out the opening time of a museum, you go to the site, navigate to the opening times page from the home page and read the time. You have what you came for. A stylish font and an attractive colour scheme are really not that important when information is all that you are after.
Now imagine you are looking at the same site from your mobile browser. You type in the museum site's address and it connects. But wait. All you can see is the very top left of the page, the size of a postage stamp. You need to scroll across to find the navigation section. And then when you do find the opening times link, it does not work. You cannot find the information you need, so you decide against going to the museum that day.
Put yourself in the museum owner's shoes. You can see the impact this could have on your business, but it does not have to be that way.
How do you make your site accessible?
There are lot of things you can do, but the main method is to use something called CSS, which stands for Cascading Style Sheet. It sits alongside the content file telling the browser how to style the content (e.g. colours, fonts, sizes, etc.). So when the browser comes to the page, it displays the content first and then according to its own settings, accommodates the styling. Using this two-tier system, the information is always accessible.
Your site can be an asset not an issue
Don’t think that useable sites have to be boring. Dunning Design are experts in building beautiful sites that are open to all. In short, we make usability and accessibility an asset rather than an issue.
Here is an example of an attractive and accessible website that we have created for Ellen Conlin Hair.
It’s a win/win situation for everyone
An accessible website will not only reach a bigger audience, but can also greatly improve search engine rankings, helping to increase further traffic to your website.
For more information on Web Accessibility, have a look at the RNIB Web Access Centre and also the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).
Don’t wait, claim your share of that £120 billion*
Contact Dunning Design and find out how simple and cost effective an accessible website can be.
