What is an accessible website?

A business needs an accessible website design site that has no session time limit and is accessible to people with disabilities. An assistive technology, user friendly website.

For those who use " keyboard navigation " to move around a website, we provide access keys, a tabindex and [ content ] bypass features. For a quick, simple text reading and audio (text to voice) browsers , we provide a plain text (.txt) document version of our archived web pages. Many hyperlinks have a title description to tell the user where the link goes. We use a slightly larger font size, for easier reading. Using high contrast (background to text color) also aids in usability.

Why have an accessible web site and what makes a website accessible?

How an accessible website helps visitors to find information

At the bottom of each web page, we provide a simple search engine access to additional research resources, a "page menu" (alt+p) to each topic section, an option to reload the current page, a link to the top accessible menu and a link directly to our Home Page (alt+h) and our accessibility policy (alt+ y). We also provide a page Last updated feature to let our visitors know when we changed the page text information. All our web pages validate as XHTML 1.0 strict, use valid CSS 2.1 stylesheets and have been formally verified. We also provide user controlled screen presentation styles to allow our visitors to customize the way they view our accessible web pages. Printing any web page on this site, using the Print Style option, provides a printed page on standard paper with most of the graphics removed. For visitors requiring a long description of the graphics we employ, the [d] beside each picture will take you to our long descriptions page. We have avoided the use of animated graphics (except on our Flash demonstration pages), to avoid a potential seizure hazard for people with epilepsy. We provide an accessible site map and an accessible menu navigation features.

Why invest in an accessible website

Authors' Note:

The web contains millions of beautiful business sites. Very few are good business information sites.

Before our design team members decided to make this site accessible to everyone, there was a considerable amount of discussion and more than a little controversy. Very few high ranking web sites even validate to W3C standards. Even fewer business sites offer any accessibility features.

We made the decision to make this website accessible, as an ethical business experiment. We believe that a user friendly website is always a win-win scenario.

Most of our design team believed that an accessible business web site would still achieve good search engine results, if it provided great business information.

Yahoo and MSN agree. See the Yahoo search results for How to find business information?. Note how many BILLION pages are returned.

We intentionally sacrificed presentation effects to write all our web pages in valid xhtml 1.0 Strict, keeping our web page markup clean and accessible. Accessibility conformance to at least WAI - AA standards, for each page proves our commitment to the ideal of full accessibility for all our website visitors.

Accessible web site features work for our business web site and they will work for your business site too.

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How to design an accessible website that is an attractive website!

Using valid CSS allows any web designer to create an attractive website that still conforms to all the accessible website guidelines. Css (or cascading style sheets) provide a simple method to create good presentation effects without excluding people with disabilities from using a website. Some of your potential customers want an accessible website to help them find business information that they can't find any other way. A good web page is accessible. It may be a little more difficult, but it's definitely worth the extra effort to find more customers!

How many websites are accessible?

The short answer is, not very many. Although difficult to determine, if less than 10% of all the websites on the web even validate to W3C standards, many of those that do still aren't accessible to even section 508 standards. Until business website owners insist that their website be accessible, graphic artists will continue to build unusable websites. As the web continues it's explosive grow, profitability will eventually force this to happen.

Why aren't all websites accessible?

It requires a lot more skill and effort than most web designers can provide. Please read: Why write accessible pages, for an explanation of the benefits of accessible web pages. See also: Accessible website tips.

If you find our accessible website information useful and wish to link directly to this accessible web page, simply copy and paste the following link text onto any of your site's pages:

<a href="http://www.asite.seowebsitesdesigners.com/accessible_web_pages/accessible_website.html">Accessible websites</a>

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Search for more accessible web site information

Please note: Google does not permit direct searches from non-exclusive business sites and so they are not included on the search engine list. Please search Google directly at www.google.com

Search multiple search engines: yahoo . yahoo.ca . msn . msn.ca . alta vista . ask by pressing each search engine name.