What is an accessible website and do I need one?
Accessibility is about ensuring everyone and everything can interact with your website. This includes people who may have disabilities, search engines and devices such as mobile phones, screen readers and printers. It is a British legal requirement under the Disability Discrimination Act that states that service providers must not discriminate against disabled people. If your website is not accessible then certain people will not be able to use your website as well as it should be for example consider the following statistics.- 9% of the UK have some form of colour blindness
- 4% of the population have some form of sight problem
- 6% of users are using Internet Explorer 6 a browser released in 2001
- Mobile phone Internet usage to overtake PCs for web surfing by 2014
How Anicca ensures full accessibility and usability for people, platforms and search engines
Who benefits from an accessible site?
Search engines need to be able to access your site so that they can find all the pages on your site and add them into your index. This is sometimes called being 'Search Engine Friendly'.
People who are visually impaired will also need to use the site maybe through the use of a screen reader. Anicca can ensure your site meets the accessibility guidelines
Different devices can see the site differently. Anicca can style a site so that it prints out correctly and looks good on a mobile phone.
Our websites are tested to be accessible to the highest levels using the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) accessibility guidelines. There are three different levels of compliance and we would usually recommend that all websites meet level 1. If your website has a large user base is for the government or charity we would usually recommend level 2
How we make usable websitesWe design all our websites with usability in mind which means the sites are easy to use and the users can easily find the information they need. We usually arrange small focus groups to review your website design and discuss any ways to improve the ease of use of your site. When creating websites we will ensure the following
- The navigation is clear and easy to use
- Accessibility - can the sites be used be search engines and disabled users
- Will the user find what they want in the minimum amount of clicks
- The pages are quick to download
We not only consider how your customers will see your website but also how the search engines will rank your site. For this reason we will ensure that
- URLs of the site include keywords relating to the content of the page
- Every page has a title describing what the page is about this will be displayed by google and at the top of the browser
- Every page has a heading displayed at the start of the page content
- Every page has a meta-description which is used by Google as the description of the site
- There is no content which the search engines can not read due to flash or frames
- We provide a static site map and a Google sitemap - both of which help to ensure the site is spidered quickly and regularly
