Accessible features are good business features

See also: How to navigate using our accessible site features. What are good website features?

Does accessibility improve search results?

Accessible web site features and good SEO practices work together

Good accessibility features are swear words to many optimizers and graphical website designers. It's a little more technically challenging to learn how to make a beautiful website accessible. When most website designers can't write valid web pages, accessibility would be impossible to achieve on the sites they design. What they won't openly admit:

GOOD accessibility is actually an important component of good seo.

For proof, you only need to read a search engine's advice to webmasters.

Note:   The bold text words are links to expanded explanations. Remember to press [backspace] to return to this page after reading the detailed explanation.

Google just described both, good seo practices and good accessibility features! Accessible web pages are user friendly and help your site find customers.

Good website accessibility features allow everyone to access your website!

Unless you have a physical or mental disability, you may not have seen a fully accessible website before. Although the WWW or ( internet ) and WAI developed website accessibility guidelines in 1999, MOST small business websites still remain "closed" to people with disabilities.

Nearly 90% of your website visitors use a mouse, computer monitor (usually in color) and a "visual display" browser (like Internet Explorer) to "surf the net." What would we do without them? How could you navigate without using your mouse? What if you couldn't easily see the monitor, read small print, see in color, or you needed to use a Braille tablet to read any text information? Without accessible web page features, you would find it very difficult to access all the information on the World Wide Web.

For the small business website owner, this means ignoring more than 10% of your potential new customers!

Website accessibility features used on this accessible business website

For those who use " keyboard navigation " to move around a website, we provide accesskeys, a tabindex and [ content ] bypass navigation features. For a quick, simple text reading and audio (text to voice) browsers , we provide a plain text (.txt) document version of each web page. Most hyperlinks have a title description to tell the user where the link goes. We use a slightly larger font size, for easier reading. Using high contrast (background to text color) also aids in usability.

At the bottom of each web page, we provide simple search engine access to additional research resources, a "page menu" (alt+p) to each topic section, an option to reload the current page, a link to the top accessible menu and a link directly to our Home Page (alt+h) and our accessibility policy (alt+ i). We also provide a page Last updated feature to let our visitors know when we changed the page text information. All our web pages validate as XHTML 1.0, use valid CSS2 stylesheets and have been formally verified. We also provide user controlled screen presentation styles to allow our visitors to customize the way they view our accessible web pages. Printing any web page using the Print_Style option, provides a printed page on standard paper with most of the presentation graphics removed. For visitors requiring a long description of the graphics we employ, the [d] beside each picture will take you to our Long Descriptions page. We have avoided the use of animated graphics (except on our Flash enabled demonstration pages), to avoid a seizure hazard for people with epilepsy. We also provide an accessible site map.

Why accessible website features can be a profitable business decision!

Since very few business websites are accessible, having an accessible website will immediately give you a credibility advantage over your competitors. Depending on the Accessibility conformance level you require, the additional cost to design an accessible website, could be easily repaid with new business in less than a year. If people with disabilities form part of your customer demographic, don't miss an entire segment of revenue generating business! accessible links help.

See also: Important accessible website design components

Our website accessibility policy and Good SEO

Are you confused about what makes SEO so important?

Please read: What is a website, before you make any business web design decisions.

Are you ready to design a business web site?

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If you find our accessible site information useful and wish to link directly to this web page, simply copy and paste the following link text onto any of your site's pages:

<a href="http://www.seowebsitesdesigners.com/accessible_web_pages/accessibility_optimization.html">Accessible web site features</a>

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