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Accessible Web Site Design

Roughly 10% of the online community has a disability of some sort (including 54 million Americans and 750 million people worldwide).

Accessible web site design is becoming more and more common place throughout the web. As one can see, disabled citizens make up a large percentage of the population. Failing to take this into account when building and designing an e-commerce web site will only hurt your brand image and your bottom line.

According to section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, federal web sites must be accessible to the disabled. It is my opinion that it is only a matter of time before commercial e-commerce vendors will be seen under the same light as federal agencies.

When implementing accessible web site design, keep in mind the following:

Screen Readers: Would your site make sense if a screen reading program read over the site?

Shortcut Keys: This includes tab indexes and access keys.

Alt tags: Using alt tags to describe images is a good practice when creating accessible web site design, not only for accessibility reasons but for web site optimization as well.