DDA AUDIT

Because it's legal and makes business sense

Accessibility myths

Disabled people don't use the Internet

Why not? Blind and deaf people probably benefit from the Internet more than anyone else. They make great use of the Internet.

Create a text-only website

You can create a separate text-only equivalent of your website, devoid of pictures and code scripts. There are a number of problems with this approach:

A text-only version is not necessarily accessible by design
Two versions of the same website can increase the cost and resource usage for your company, and you can make errors in updating two websites
Your primary website will remain inaccessible to the users you are trying to target with a text-only site
Providing a 'special' website for the disabled is in itself a form of discrimination, and can lead those users to feeling marginalised
Search engines could regard the doubling up of information as an attempt to spam them to improve your website page ranking

Making websites accessible is too complicated and expensive

If you develop a website from scratch, you should automatically make it accessible - otherwise you are developing something that is illegal. It should not cost any more to develop an accessible website.

If you are retrofitting a highly inaccessible website, and you want to keep the site layout and design, you will need to factor more time and budget for this.

Creativity and accessibility do not go together

Most people think that jumping through legal hoops stifles creativity. This may be true in other areas, but there are many examples of very creative, accessible websites. Web accessibility does not need to affect the design of a website at all.

Look at the websites created for the project CSS Zen Garden - go to the website - or get the book with great step-by-step instructions (both links open a new window).

My site visitors do not have a problem with my website

Maybe so - if you have a closed site, and you know every member of your 'community' you may be right. It is more likely that your site is open to everyone and anyone.

As a result it is unlikely that anyone (and this includes the search engine robots) prevented from entering your website will waste their time complaining to you, and will not return to the site - therefore, one lost customer (and then multiply this!).

There are, after all, millions upon millions of other websites to go to.