7 Reasons Why Every Cloud Publisher Should Care About Accessibility – Part 1

When we think of disabilities, most tend to think about the extremes: someone blind since birth…a quadriplegic…being completely deaf. Yet most disabilities are more subtle, more temporary, and most of us have them.

And that’s not counting when you’re on the treadmill at the gym where five TVs are showing five stations: the sound is turned off and the captions are on, and so everyone is temporarily deaf. Or when we use a black and white laser printer to print a Web page: almost all of us experience that temporary colour blindness…and if you don’t design your pages to work in black and white, you’ve lost audience.

Truth is most of us have some sort of substantial disability, and we’re all temporarily disabled when we’re standing on the bus, holding a bag of groceries in one hand and trying to Skype on our Android smartphone with the other.

… and so we risk losing a substantial portion of the audience we deserve when we don’t follow the inclusive design principles that are sure to leave no one behind…

1. Search engines have severe disabilities that affect SEO.

   Perhaps the most frequent visitor to your Web site has severe disabilities. Google’s search spider (and Yahoo’s and Bing’s) is blind, deaf, and has the cognitive abilities of a four-year-old at best.

   Search is getting cleverer every day. But when a spider arrives to index a website that pays no attention to accessibility, it gets a distorted or incomplete idea about that site. Without the confidence that it is perceiving how your site is organized and what’s there, you risk low rankings or content (text, photos, multimedia) that is missed entirely.

   So designing for accessibility is simply good business.

2. From time to time, we all have temporary disabilities.

   According to the U.S. Census of 2010, about 1 in 5 Americans have a substantial permanent disability:

   • 8.1 million have difficulty seeing, even with glasses or contacts
   • 7.6 million have trouble hearing, even with a hearing aid
   • 6.7 million have difficulty grasping objects like a pencil or PC mouse
   • 5.1 million have trouble concentrating on tasks

   As well, around 10% of men have a color deficit, so you can’t rely on color to explain things to them. And as per my examples in the gym and at the photocopier, we all experience disability regularly. So if we want everyone to get our message all of the time, inclusive design simply makes sense.

3. An accessible product helps every visitor.

   When we design for the extremes, everyone benefits. You may not need the cuts in the sidewalks that allow wheelchairs to cross intersections easily. But you sure enjoy them when you’re towing a suitcase or pushing a stroller.

   A more accessible product benefits everyone, not just visitors with permanent challenges.

   Following the information design principles that are implied in the WCAG 2.0 accessibility guidelines can help all your visitors have a better experience with your site or app or distance learning application.

   Designers and content professionals are often concerned that if they follow the accessibility principles there will be a trade-off of good user experience for their mainstream users. And indeed if you don’t understand why each rule exists there is that chance. However if you take the time to understand the thinking behind the guidelines, I promise we can show you how to implement every Level A and Level AA guidelines without tradeoffs…and most often with benefits for all: add more options for entering, viewing and formatting information; removing barriers to navigation; and repairing flaws in the user experience.

Accessible design helps build a better user experience that not only accommodates, but delights. Stay tuned for the second part of this post, which will cover accessible websites, products, standards and regulations.