What is an accessible website?
An accessible website is one that is useable by all. This is good for people with disabilities, good for people who choose to turn off images and other things when browsing, and good for your business. The more people who can access you online the better.
Amazingly, accessibility was not an issue only a few years ago. In 1999 global companies were rushing to build websites without understanding the impact on their customers. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was the only browser most people cared about, and as long as you tested your website in the two most recent flavours of it, you had done your job.
It is a radically different landscape now, and thank goodness for that! People own many machines to view websites on: PCs, mobile phones, PDAs, televisions, games consoles. And on these machines there are many different pieces of software to help them do this: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Camino, all of which can run on Windows, Mac or Linux operating systems.
People with visual impairments care how websites use text size, text colours, background colours, and background patterns. They need to be able to read the website through a screen-reader, and that screen-reader needs to be able to make sense of the navigation on the website, as well as the layout and content. Some people may not be able to use a mouse to navigate a website, and use the keyboard instead. Every visitor to a website is an individual with particular needs.
The only way to build a website to meet all these needs is through industry standards, specifically those of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). There is another set of standards you often see, those of Bobby. Each have different levels of compliance, but if you meet the minimum requirements in both cases the vast majority of people will be able to access your website and use it fully.
So an accessible website is useable by all if it is built to W3C standards. This means the code is structured correctly so all software can read it, including search engines. Images have text descriptions. Navigation is obvious and clear. Colours and contrasts are easy to discern, and so on.
As an industry it is vital that web designers do the basics well. And I believe accessibility, as well as being a legal necessity, is a moral imperative.
The World Wide Web Consortium
W3C standards for websites
Web Xact (was Bobby)
The Web Standards Project