Common Myths Regarding Accessibility

Historically, there has been some resistance among web designers toward building websites in an accessible manner. This resistance has arisen not due to a wish to discriminate against people who might benefit from accessible design, but rather from a fear that accessibility will limit designers’ options in how they create their sites. There’s also the fact that accessibility seems like it will add additional work, and most people have too much to do already.

For a long time, many people thought that accessible was a code word for an all text website. It was believed that adding accessibility meant putting all of your content in a single column running straight down the page, and avoiding the bells and whistles that many people believe are necessary for an attractive website. The fact is that this couldn’t be further from the truth. Although some common techniques can interfere with accessibility, that doesn’t mean that you must remove any images, sounds, or multimedia from your website. Nor does it dictate that your layout be simplified.

The demand that accessibility places on designers is that they write clean, standards compliant markup, take advantage of HTML features that improve accessibility, and that they use tags as they are intended to be used in the specification rather than based on how they make your pages look in the browser. The best example here is tables. At one time, nearly all websites used tables not only for showing things like tables of statistics, but also for controlling the layout of entire pages. These types of approaches run counter to how HTML was intended to be used, and make things much more difficult for users with alternative browsers.

Needless to say, to continue to use complex layouts in an accessible world, you have to upgrade to current techniques; in other words, create your layouts using cascading style sheets (CSS). Just as this approach provides cutting-edge look and feel in the latest browsers and yet gracefully degrades to still display information adequately in older browsers, it provides the same benefits in alternative browsers. Because the markup is so simple and is properly used when you use CSS to handle layout, alternative browsers for the disabled can handle the markup just fine. That’s not the case when you use eight levels of nested tables to make your page look the way you want it to.

The other common misapprehension with regard to accessibility is that it will require a lot of extra work on your part. The fact is that it does require some extra work creating your pages so that they take advantage of accessibility features in HTML is more work than leaving them out. However, in many cases, coding for accessibility will help all of your users, not just those using alternative browsers.

Even though accessibility issues ostensibly affect only a small percentage of web users, they should not be ignored. Many accessibility-related improvements actually improve the web experience for most users. Leaving out disabled users by not accounting for them in your designs is inconsiderate, and can often be a poor business decision as well. Adding accessibility features to an existing site can be challenging, but when you build new sites from scratch, making them accessible can often be done with little additional effort.  :grin:  :grin:

Written by Andy MacDonald from Swift Media UK
Posted on March 26th, 2008 and filed under Design & Coding
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