Accessibility is about everyone being able to access content online regardless of any physical impairment they may have. There are statutes that compel all web sites to be accessible. iMaker endeavour to build your website to be as accessible as possible, but that means more work for us, so how does it benefit you, the client?

Better search rankings. Search engines find it easier to catalogue web sites that are written for accessibility. As the majority of people find things on the internet using search engines, the easier you can make the engines job, the better for you.

Long term Cost. Building an accessible web site means separating content from presentation to produce a content (xhtml) page and a presentation (css) page. These two files combine to provide the browser with the “whole web page” for display. There could be many thousands of html files in your site but only one css file. If you want to change the layout for your site you just need to change the one css file, that will change the layout for the entire site!

Compatibility. Again building an accessible site should mean that your site looks the same in any browser, certainly the most popular, such as Internet explorer, Opera, Firefox and Safari. All your users will see the website as you do.

Speed. A website built for accessibility will load much quicker than one that hasn’t and so keep your visitors happy and hopefully interested.