What is web accessibility & why is it important?

Web accessibility is about making your website accessible to all Internet users (both disabled and non-disabled), regardless of what browsing technology they're using. In addition to complying with the law, an accessible website can reap huge benefits on to your website and your business.

Your website must be able to function with all different browsing technologies

The first and perhaps the most important rule of web accessibility. Not everyone is using the latest version of Internet Explorer, with all the plug-ins and programs that you may require them to have for your website. Different browsing technologies, each with their own accessibility requirements, can include:

* Lynx browser - Text-only browser with no support for tables, CSS, images, JavaScript, Flash or audio and video content

* WebTV - 560px in width with horizontal scrolling not available

* Screen reader - Page content read aloud in the order it appears in the HTML document

* Handheld device - Very small screen with limited support for JavaScript and large images

* Screen magnifier - As few as three to four words may be able to appear on the screen at any one time

* Slow connection (below 56kb) - Users may turn off images to enable a faster download time

* 1600px screen width - Very wide screen

This basically means that to ensure your website is accessible to everyone you must provide alternatives to:

* Images - in the form of ALT text

* JavaScript - through the tag

* Flash - with HTML equivalents

* Audio & video - by using subtitles or written transcripts

For enhanced website accessibility you must also be careful how your pages look when support for CSS and/or tables has been removed.

There are two good ways you can check your website is accessible for all these:

* Download the Opera browser and read this article on checking web accessibility with Opera (http://www.sitepoint.com/article/checking-just-browser)

* Download the Lynx browser from http://lynx.browser.org and see if you can successfully access every part of your website

Forms need to be accessible to all web users

When a web user fills out a form it's a great thing. People fill out forms to:

* Buy a product * Sign up to a newsletter * Ask a question

These are the goals of your website! A site visitor may look through your site, decides he likes what he sees and tries to sign up to your newsletter.

...But the form isn't accessible to him so he clicks away and you lose a potential customer. Most forms on the web suffer from accessibility issues. The two main reasons for this are:

* Prompt text is incorrectly positioned * Prompt text is unassigned to form items (Prompt text is the text that appears next to each form item, for example,