Blind Student Hits Target with Class Action Lawsuit - Accessibility Tips
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Well, the first and most obvious thing you need to do is place alt= tags on all of your images. This will enable screen readers to understand and “read” their content to blind visitors to your web site. That’s a current best practice anyway. Make sure the text in your alt= tag is actually descriptive; don’t treat it as just another place to stuff keywords.
There are other things you need to be careful about as well. Are you thinking of adding some of that wonderful AJAX to your web site to improve your visitors’ experiences? Remember May’s comments about JavaScript, and think twice. Also, depending on exactly how the code sets it up, there are some versions of tag clouds that are difficult for screen readers to handle.
If you still want to use AJAX, it’s not impossible to have your cake and eat it too. On Webmaster World, forum poster cmarshall notes that “I use AJAX quite a bit, and my sites are accessible up the yin-yang. It just takes some extra effort, which is actually often a tall order, as time==money. I have the ‘luxury’ of doing sites pro bono, which means I can take the time to ‘polish the fenders’ without fretting” about lost money.
Don’t assume that only ecommerce web sites need to become accessible. The blind are visitors with interests just like any others. True, they have special needs, but they’re also interested in content, making them not so different from your other visitors. And just like your other visitors, if you make it easy for them to find what they’re looking for, they’ll keep coming back. You’d be crazy to cut yourself off from a potential market – and yet, plenty of web sites do just that.
I’ll close with a story from Webmaster World that might serve as encouragement. A poster going by the handle Beagle reported not having Flash on his office computer; the department PC manager will not install it. His department does cancer research. He was on the web site of a major national cancer organization and noticed an interesting book for sale there that he hadn’t seen before, so he went to the site’s store area to buy it. “The entire store set-up was done in flash! I couldn’t even see images of the book covers, much less purchase anything. I emailed them, thinking that surely they must have an alternate way of buying something, but the reply was more or less, ‘Sorry, that’s how it is.’”
That represents one lost sale for the site, and it probably wasn’t the only one it lost. If you make your web site more accessible, you just might see your sales go up, simply because fewer of them will be lost. Or, to put it in terms of dollars and cents, accessibility is good for business.
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