website Accessibility Consulting Services
Does your business lock out 20% of the customers who try to come through the door? Do you tell every 5th person that walks through your door they can't buy from you? Of course you don't! Then why isn't your website fully accessible to those with special needs? It is estimated that 20% of the web surfing population has some disability that may stop them from viewing and using your website. The numbers may actually surprise you. If your website is not within these people's reach you may actually be turning away hundreds of potential customers per day. Can your business afford that?
Disabled May Not Mean What You Think It Means
According to recent polls 14% of web users are registered as disabled. Recent statistics also show that one in twelve men and one in 200 women suffer from some for of color blindness, 4% of the web surfing population has some sort of sight problem and 21% of the population is over age 60. When you add all the numbers up a possible 48% of the population may have some difficulty accessing your website. Several other factors may make your website inaccessible to the average user. Some of these are:
- Users who have slow connections may shut images off to make downloads faster
- Users may not have the Flash plug in or the latest version of Flash, or may not wish to wait for the additional download time
- Many users may shut off JavaScript in an attempt to stop viruses or pop ups. Any JavaScript driven content on your site will be unavailable to them, including JavaScript driven menu systems!
- PDAs, Mobile Phones & TV driven web browsers have extremely limited support for JavaScript, large images & Flash. Coincidentally these devices are the fastest growing sector of web capable devices today
The numbers, even if they are half of what the reports claim, are enough to make any businessperson think about who they may be excluding! We don't think there is any business in the world that can afford to ignore these numbers!
More Benefits Than First Meets The Eye
Creating a truly accessible website not only opens your business up to potential new clients it creates some wonderful side effects. Many of the search engine
spiders use the same base technology that screen readers (used by the visually impaired to read websites) use. By creating a website that is wide open to
these screen readers you have also created a website that is 100% search engine friendly. Listings will increase as well as deep crawling
by the search
engines providing your website with more listings than ever before.
It Just Makes Good Business Sense!
Not only is creating a fully accessible website the right thing to do
it only makes sense to maximize your exposure to any potential customer that may be
interested in your products or services. Combine this new potential clientele with better search engine rankings and it's a win - win situation.
DCD Designs can help you get your website to these standards so you can open up your website to everyone who may want to
use it.
To have a DCD Designs staff member evaluate your website to accessibility standards please contact us.
Lissa Lee, bathandbodycare.com | More Testimonials >>