Accessibility and Standards: Why web designers consider them important and why they should be important to you.

Honestly, web designers are a geeky lot. If you strip away the creative process we give our left brains a pretty good workout. More often than not we’ll meet with a prospective client and try to sell ourselves using our knowledge of web standards and accessibility. “Your site will be built to be fully accessible and standards compliant” we’ll say and wait for the client to look as excited as we are. “Hmm, Where is the benefit to my business” they are surely thinking and “What the heck are standards and accessibility?”

Standards compliant markup means the designer has spent time developing a site using markup that will be read consistently across browsers and has stayed away from using proprietary tags or styles. This is simultaneously a line in the sand and a measure that ensures each person visiting your site will see the same content and receive the same message.

To understand why I say it is a line in the sand you need to understand a little bit of the history and rationale behind the web. Admittedly this is the probably the shortest and most dumbed down history of the Internet on the web but it should suffice.

The Internet began as the answer to the problem of sharing information over vast distances with people who would be viewing it on different computer operating systems. From the very beginning it was about sending the same message to everyone regardless of the differences between their computers. This was not an easy task but HTML was meant to standardize the display.

Initially the intent was to share scientific and scholarly information but it didn’t take long for the advertising and marketing industry to catch on to the vast potential of the Internet.

In fact it took about a nanosecond.

Marketing is essentially visual as almost all relationships start with attraction. The limits of basic html were quickly exceeded and the battle of the browsers began. Proprietary markup was introduced with each new version in the hopes that designers would design primarily for certain browsers thus gently forcing the public to adopt the “browser with the most toys”.

There are still remnants of those days. Occasionally you will stumble upon a site that says “Best viewed in Internet Explorer” but in general designers have realized that new features are best left to the standards developing bodies such as the W3C. Browser developers are expected to adhere to these standards more and more as it is clear to us that clients, designers and the public benefits.

The point is to get the same message to everyone regardless of their browser choice or their computer choice or their operating system. That always was the point.

Accessibility is essentially the same thing but it gives standards a helping hand. Even if you have done a fabulous job making your site standards compliant and every browser is rendering it the same way the individual you are trying to reach may have a hard time reading the type due to vision problems. An accessible site will allow type to be easily magnified. Try control+ or command+ depending on your browser to see this in action. Control or command- will reduce it again. An accessible site will label images and will ease the process of using a form for those who are viewing your site in a screen reader.

Building sites in this way is no longer considered an extra. It shows you are trying to reach out to all, not just some of your sites potential visitors.

And that should help your bottom line as well.