Small Business Web Design - Impact Of W3c Guidelines

By Author: Alex Baker
Total Articles: 149
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W3C Web Accessibility Guidelines are meant for making the website more accessible. Compliance with these guidelines could yield rich dividends while ignoring could possibly bring disaster to your online business and may prove fatal for the website.

Some of the prominent aspects of the W3C guidelines are as follows.

1. Web accessibility to the disabled:
The U.S. Bureau of the Census states that the number of disabled adults (aged 18 years or more) stood at 32 million in the year 2004. This number excludes the 5 million youth (under 18 year’s age) and children. If the people with other impairments and/ or physical limitations that cannot be tagged as physical disability, the total number of the disable could even touch 51 million. That is a sizable proportion of the market. If the website is not accessible to these disabled people, the business is losing a number of prospective customers, leaving them to be attended and catered to by your competitors.

Website Accessibility by the elderly people:
Usually it has been observed that as the age of a person increases, the vision capabilities decline. ...
... The number of the elderly population in the USA is increasing. If the website is not accessible to this market segment or they find it difficult to read the content of the website, the website may possibly lose a lot of business. It is because of this that the website should be readable and legible to all the targeted audience especially the elderly population.

Website Accessibility through non-standard browsers:
Besides the Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox there are a number of other browsers. The operating system and the platform of the iPhones and the PDA also differ. The website should be designed to be compatible with every kind of browser. This is necessary to assure accessibility of the website by every internet user.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
If your website is easy to navigate by the disabled, it is obvious that the navigation for the spiders and the crawlers through your website is going to be a cake walk. This has a very big positive impact on the efficiency of efforts made for search engine optimization. This makes the indexing task of the search engines very easy.

Sued for not being accessible:
In the future the government may make the accessibility to the website a right of any individual. In the future there could be laws for suing the businesses whose websites are not accessible. This means if the website is not accessible to everyone, the business will have to get it redesigned or upgraded.

Web site accessibility through old equipment:
Everyone is not supposed to have the latest computer and the connected to high speed ADSL. There are many people who try to access the internet through their old PCs and internet connections with low downloading speed. There are equipments where in only the text is displayed and not the images. The website should be accessible to these kind of old equipment users as well.

Socially responsibility:
When the website is accessible to all kind of people including the physically disabled and those with limited old edition equipments, it proves that the business is socially responsible and offering services to all possible buyers.

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