Web Accessibility – Importance within SEO
Web accessibility is important for many reasons, but one that often gets overlooked is the importance of accessibility within search engine optimisation. First we will look at the general importance of web accessibility.
Ethics
It is important that anything you publish on the web is accessible to all users, this includes the hard of sight, hearing and non-mouse users. I have used talkr.com to automatically provides an audio version on the posts which are posted via this blog. It is easy to set up and install and well worth it.
Target Audience
If your site isn’t designed for all types of users you are narrowing the scale of your websites audience. There are lots of simple javascript text enlarger out there and can be installed to ensure that hard of sight or an elderly audience can use your website correctly by increase the text size. The other main point is to ensure that your site uses em’s as the font size, this allows software installed within browsers to easily increase the size of a websites font. (you can use cmd + and cmd – to increase and decrease the font size on this site).
Possible can be the law
Not so much in the UK, but in some states of America it can the law for large blue chip companies to have a user accessible website.
Now for the SEO benefits
Well its simple really, Google, Yahoo! and MSN are all trying to provide the user with very best result dependent on their search query, Now lets say there is a very relevant site that isn’t accessible to all types of users… It deserves to be there because of the quality of information it provides, but is let down by the build quality. This site may list well, but when a site with good content and good accessibility comes along it will lose its current listing. Google needs to future proof itself as the amount of variation in users increases. The last thing Google needs is a disabled friendly search engine taking its market share.
My advice, do all you can, look at your competitors and do some research. It is important now, but will become increasingly important in the future.
