Accessibility testing

"Leaving no one behind"

Ensuring your site is accessible is a fundamental of any good website.

Many business owners are unsure how and why they should make their website accessible, and a common misconception is that ‘accessibility’ means catering for vision-impaired users by making the website bland, boring or ugly.

Thankfully nowadays we can have great looking, accessible websites, and the business case for ensuring your site is accessible is compelling – more customers will be able to see your website more easily.

On closer inspection accessibility is a vast area. Accessibility covers:

• people who don't use a mouse and rely on the keyboard for navigation
• people who are vision-impaired or blind
• people using browsers with JavaScript and/or support for Flash switched off (this is quite common in a corporate or government environment)
• people using slow internet connections
• people using minority browsers or operating systems.

There is a long list of tricks and tools that I use to make websites as accessible as possible. A few common conventions include ensuring:

• code is ‘well formed’
• your site ‘works’ in different browsers and technologies
• text is resizable
• graphics are labeled and optimised.