Accessible design and development - Your website

An Accessible site is one which does not exclude anybody due to:

• Their own abilities or environment, or
• The method they choose to access the web.

Accessibility is not just about ensuring disabled people can access your information, services or products; although this is important and may well be a legal requirement in your area or country. It is also about ensuring that the wide variety of users and devices can all gain access to your information, services or products and maximising the potential audience by letting users experience the pages the way they choose to.

Accessible sites make content, structure and ease of navigation a priority over certain aspects of design; however they need not be visually un-attractive, nor are they prevented from utilising the latest web technologies.
The web is a powerful and flexible medium, providers of inaccessible sites fail to utilise its full potential, and fail to realise the benefits of accessibility.

For all sites there are likely to be users with different sensory and perceptual capabilities who access the information in a variety of situations or environments with a variety of different hardware and software devices. This is true even when the audience may appear restricted and well defined such as for a corporate intranet. The design of the site must support all users - it must be accessible.

Different sensory and perceptual capabilities include:

• Lack of or restricted vision
• Colour deficiency
• Hearing loss
• Restricted literacy
• Perceptual deficits
• Movement disability
• Comprehension difficulties

Different environments or situations include:

• Noisy office or workplace
• Low or high illumination

Different devices include:

• A multitude of graphical browsers
• Text only browsers
• Speech synthesis browsers
• Internet enabled phones
• Personal Digital Assistants
• Printed output
• Games consoles
• WebTV

All pages of all sites should support all possible combinations of the above. This is the ultimate goal of accessibility.