Apart from the obvious ethical and legal reasons (Disability Discrimination Act 1995, the Disability Rights Commission Act 1999, the Codes of Practice and Regulations) for ensuring your site is accessible, there are clear commercial ones too. By designing sites that use the very latest technology, with complete disregard to those without the latest software and browser-plugins, we would not be using our web site to maximum market visibility. Furthermore, to say "we would design for 70% of the market" would be the same as saying "we would deliberately discard 30% of our potential client-base". It is not more costly to make web sites accessible, it is just a matter of following simple guidelines.

An accessible web site is almost always a "Usable" web site. This will give the user a better and more efficient experience while browsing - a strong reason for the user to return to the site. In our experience accessibility and good site organisation go hand-in-hand making the site adminstrators task much less onerous. This allows you to spend more time on what your visitors wanted to see - content.

Also, a search engine is potentially the most important visitor to a site. Accessible sites are designed from the ground up with this special user in mind, and they allow a search engine full access to the content in a structured way. This meand that the web content is ranked correctly according to relevancy, and will therefore have an increased chance of appearing in the result of a search relevant to the contents of that page.

What is accessibility?

Common excuses for non-accessible web sites:

• "the technology we have chosen to use, is not accessible"
• "most people use Internet Explorer"
• "most people use 800 x 600 screens"
• "we don't have accessibility experts in our team"
• "we cannot afford to make our web site accessible"
• "it is more difficult to make web sites accessible"
• "accessible web sites are boring"
• "blind people will not appreciate our art-based web site"
• "for security reasons"