Accessibility
By Andrew Donaldson, aged 26¾, tictoc Developer & Accessibility guru!
Accessibility. It's the Marmite of web development. It's often abused as both an inhibitor of new ideas ("You can't do that, it's not accessible!") and as sales tool ("It's illegal to be inaccessible!"). There is no doubting that fighting for accessibility is a noble cause, though aside from the warm-fuzzy feeling you get from going the extra mile, are there real business benefits?
So, what actually is accessibility? At it's most literal it simply means 'available for use'. By creating a site from the ground up with accessibility in mind, you are increasing the potential audience of your website. An accessible website is more likely to be usable without modification on alternate browsers such as those found on mobile phones or assistive technologies.
Additionally, having an accessible website can offer further free benefits. By ensuring that your website's content is available to all, search engines can take full advantage. When the search engine spiders* peruse your site, the picture they build up is limited to the content that is accessible; text within a graphic won't be read, though the alternate text± associated with the image will. With more content being made available to the spiders, the search engines will build up a more comprehensive image of your organisation and as a result you will be better represented without additional effort.
Accessibility on the web has matured beyond checking boxes to comply with legislation, to offering real value to organisations by increasing availability of content to their users.
* Spiders - black eight legged creatures aimed at creating hysteria in most women / A program that automatically fetches Web pages. Spiders are used to feed pages to search engines. It's called a spider because it crawls over the Web. Another term for these programs is webcrawler.
± Alternate text or Alt attribute - a way to help describe an image which is not visible for users (or computers).