Web Design Ireland

Wise man once said, “With great power, comes great responsibility”. As developers this holds true, with each one of us ultimately being responsible for our visitors experience on the web. It’s for that reason that every company serious about web development needs to be accessibility testing. Serious accessibility testing - not just your average “bobby check“, (incidently this is no longer free - snapped up by IBM and is now a further burden on creating accessible sites, unless you pay for the priviledge) but get several (accessible) testers in place to give your site the once over from an accessibility point of view. Humans do a much better job of analysing a site than an automated tool - and unfortunately you can’t rely on this anymore.

I hold my hands up, this site probably doesn’t conform to accessible standards, and as a result you all probably feel this is a bit “kettle calling the pot black”, but I’ve a few plans afoot to get this site (as a starting point) to be one of the better sites out there online. There is a huge market for e-commerce site to get in on if they get this sort of thing right. For starters, word of mouth will carry the site to a bigger audience - i.e. primarily disabled web users. Government departments are also getting in on the act with more and more tender documents now stating that sites built should comply with (their own) directives. i.e. Accessibility Standards.

We are also starting to see that major sites around the web have been caught with their accessible pants down. For example Facebook has a group dedicated to making them change their policy on inaccessible captchas. You can read more about the underlying problem over here. They have how started to change that, and we too should be sitting up, taking notice and making it a number one priority for any site that goes out the door. After all the first step to solving a problem is admiting that there is a problem.

One of the simplest things we can do is to run our websites through a screenreader, and see how it performs. Reading the WAI guidelines front to back is also a must..

It’s time we took that responsibility on board, and start making the web a better place for everyone.  Who knows it may even result in a boost in your business.