Benefits of a website Part 1 Reach Higher

Benefits of a website Part 1 Reach Higher The DDA (Disability Discrimination Act) provides that service providers must not discriminate against persons with disabilities. A website is regarded as a service and therefore falls under this law, and as such should be accessible to all. Some organizations make improvements to the accessibility of their websites, but many people do not seem to make accessibility adjustments. Disabled people have no access to their site, they say, why should be care? Why you should care about disabled Inteet users statistics on the number of users who encounter problems in May due to the accessibility of your website are quite surprising: * There are 8.6 million disabled people in the United Kingdom - 14% of the population (source: DRC) * One of 12 men and 200 women have some form of color blindness - 9% of the UK population (source: Institute of Electrical Engineers) * Two million UK residents have a sight problem - 4% of the population (source: RNIB) * There are 12 million people over the age of 60 years or more - 21% of the population of the Kingdom Great Britain (source: Govement of the United Kingdom) Although there is inevitably some overlap between the groups mentioned above, adding to these figures gives a total of 48% of the UK population, that could experience problems with your website for accessibility. This is an extraordinarily high number. It is not just disabled users who can not access your Web site in May without disabilities have difficulties with the accessibility of your website. Not everyone is viewing your website the latest version of Inteet Explorer, with all plug-ins and programs that require you to May for optimal access. If your website is based on images, JavaScript or Flash, and does not provide alteatives, then your site will be accessible to a number of web users. The following examples are common: * Users on slow connections, but the images, in tu regularly to speed download time. Some browsers, such as text-only Lynx browser do not display images at all. * Not all users have downloaded the latest version of Flash is required to access your site. In addition, download time on Flash websites are often so long that users lose patience and I can not wait to see the content. Only 25% of Web users in the UK are connected to the Inteet via broadband (source: national statistics). * JavaScript is a scripting language that can cause changes to a page, often through mouse functions, buttons, or other user actions. For example, pop-ups are opened using JavaScript. JavaScript is not supported by around 5% of web users, either because they have made large to prevent unwanted pop-ups or because their browser does not support (source: The Counter). Any content of JavaScript on your website are not accessible to these users. * PDAs, mobile phones and WebTV have limited support for large images, Flash and JavaScript. You can check your web site to download the free WebTV viewer. You can also check out how the site looks like a phone with Wapalizer. Do not underestimate the importance of this: in 2008, only an estimated 58 million PDAs will be sold (source: eTForecast) and one third of the world's population has a wireless device (source: ClickZ)