75 Ways to Improve Your Website Accessibility to Increase Visitors and Customers

If you are a webmaster or website owner and would like to increase your site usability beyond the common technical accessibility, you should consider the findings outlined in a special report that could give your website users and visitors with disabilities a boost against your competition.

The usability study was conducted by the Nielsen Norman Group, a company specializing on corporate culture and consumer oriented strategies for product development.

Do you know what happens when someone with vision or motor disabilities, for example, visits your site? If your websites uses traditional design or navigation accessibility, you are leaving a good portion of those visitors unable to interact with your site.

After testing 19 websites and intranets in the United States and Japan, from Charles Schwab (an investment company) to Ways Shop (a Japanese e-commerce site) researches found out that almost eight out of ten people with some type of motor impairment - those using screen readers, Braille readers, or magnifiers on their computers - failed to navigate those websites and made from 200% to 450% more errors compared to users without disabilities. Basically, they were unable to interact or make use of information contained in the majority of the websites visited.

What these findings mean for potential customers or visitors to your website?

If someone with disabilities is visiting your site with the intention of buying, finding information, or comparing products, there is a high probability they will leave empty handed. Worst yet, they might never go back to your site.

The report outlines 75 specific guidelines and recommendations you can follow to avoid those pitfalls and increase your site usability among people with some form of physical impartment. The report advices how to develop good graphics and multimedia, pop-up windows, links, buttons, page organization, search modules, shopping interactivity and frames.

With the explosion in internet use, many websites have implemented graphic accessibility and ease of use into their design; unfortunately, those same sites, it seems, are still failing that special group of visitors with physical impediments.

And as the World Wide Web population continues to grow, it is becoming more critical for companies and webmasters to go beyond coding standards and government rules that are having little or no impact on accessibility.

You should not expect to make your website as accessible to people with physical impairments as it is to those with no physical disabilities, but there are some design factors you can take into consideration to give your site a boost for your visitors and your bottom line as well.