Web accessibility: An introduction

Web accessibility is about making your website accessible to all Internet users (both disabled and non-disabled), regardless of what browsing technology they're using.

Accessible websites usually see a large increase in traffic as they become available to all Internet users. Web accessibility is extremely important as a website that's optimised in web accessibility has numerous benefits:

Fulfilling legal obligation

In 1995 the Disability Discrimination Act was passed
In 1999 part III of the Act, which refers to service providers, came into force
In 2002 the Code of Practice for part III of the Act was published and specifically mentions that accessible websites are now a legal requirement

Maximising access to your website

Nowadays websites can be accessed using a variety of different devices, each one facing different accessibility issues:

Handheld device - Very small screen with limited support for JavaScript and large images (e.g. mobile phone, PDA)
Screen reader - Reads the content of the page aloud in the order it appears in the HTML document (used by blind web users)
Screen magnifier - Magnifies the screen so only a very small section of the page can be viewed at any one time (used by web users with poor vision)
WebTV - 560px in width with horizontal scrolling not available
Lynx browser - Text-only browser with no support for tables, CSS, images, JavaScript, Flash or audio and video content

The number of people accessing the Internet from handheld devices is increasing at a massive rate - in 2008 there'll be an estimated 58 million PDAs sold worldwide.

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