Universal Design: One Site to Rule Them All
By Kristine Schachinger | Search Engine Watch
As someone who has been building websites for over 11 years, I can tell you the two areas that are the least understood and the most maligned are compliance and accessibility.
Seen as a type of website welfare, only for the few, they are often ignored as an “only if I have to” or “only if I’m sued” addition to most websites. But following W3C compliance and the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) Level AA can help you reach an untapped $13 trillion market, and also reduce your IT costs, ready you for mobile, improve your Google quality score, and organic search engine placements.
Also, adding the accessibility guidelines would require only 2 percent more effort if you’re doing everything else right, so you could have just one website to meet all your needs. (Note: there are some sites where the functionality is so complex a mobile site will be necessary to present users with paired down functionality. However, most sites can be transformed to work with smart phones and dumb phone mobile devices without creating a second site.)
No way you say? Yep, way. Here’s how. Read the rest of this entry »

