By Maurice McGrath
Web Development Team Leader
A world wide web that allows for the needs of disabled users is extremely desirable. People with all kinds of disabilities are drawn to the internet as a source of information and communication. Search engines can provide entertainment, recruitment services, shopping services, or essential information on topics relevant to disabled users. Forums and bloggs can provide ways of sharing experiences over the web.
The internet is more flexible media than print. For instance, partially sighted users can increase the font size to make text more readable and text-to-speech conversion is much more successful when applied to electronic text. However screen readers can only read what is there to read. They cannot read images, Flash or other non-text information. Workarounds for this include using descriptive "alt" tags with images to provide a viable alternative for visually disabled users. Indeed "alt" tags were introduced for this very purpose although more recently they have been used as a method of optimising sites for the search engines.
More information on accessibility guidelines can be found at the WC3 WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative). The basic goals of the W3C accessibility guidelines are that web-based information should be presented in a manner that is readable and logical. To get an idea of what a screen-reader can see on the web you could download the Lynx text-only browser. The Opera browser also has functionality to allow you to turn off display of images.
The goals outlined above have a familiar ring for those of us who are involved in the industry of optimising web sites for the search engines. Search engine spiders also prefer text content that is readable and logical. They are drawn to relevant, plain text, not flashy images. Like most web users they don’t like to have their time wasted with irrelevant information and prefer content that reflects the titles, meta tags and page headings. They also prefer simple text-based navigation with link-text that is descriptive and relevant.
There are a number of techniques which can help to make a web site more accessible. Well-planned text-based site maps, for instance, with summary information about each section provide blind or partially sighted users with an excellent means of navigation via screen readers. They also act as a very good means of attracting search engine spiders deeper into your site. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) provide a means of isolating content and style on web pages. The style code can be externalised from the page via a CSS include file and this allows developers to cut down on code bloat and and therefore simplify the code path for screen readers and spiders to follow.
The bottom line is... an accessible site is a search engine-friendly site. More than any other factor, perhaps it will be market forces that drive the world wide web down the road to accessibility.
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