Should search engines rule in favour of accessibility?
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008
Accessibility is hot topic right now. As web developers we are still learning the potential of the medium and how it can affect our lives. We are realising the impact it can have on people, especially in liberating those with disabilities. But instead of ranking websites in favour of their accessibility to people with disabilities, Google are providing a separate search site for accessible content.
It would be easy to think that everyone developed for every common denominator, but that simply isn’t the case. There are a lot of developers out there glossing over the fact in favour of getting the job done. I don’t blame them, people have to start somewhere, and without looking into the issue how can you really know who you are catering for? However under UK law your site must be accessible to disabled people.
What does it mean to be accessible? Well to understand that we really need to know what kind of disabilities are out there, from Dyslexia to the hearing impaired there are a whole range of disabilities varying in complexity.
Disabled people have a lot of different ways of viewing web sites, sight impaired people would need to use screen readers to read the content for them, dyslexic people may need the content broken up for them and shown in high contrast. The hearing impaired would need video content served with subtitles.
So why if in a world where the search engines rule, do they not take a step forward and punish those sites that do not comply to web standards in terms of accessibility? Maybe it’s because there is a lot of complexity involved in the varying degrees of disabilities, maybe it’s because there is no hard or fast rule that suddenly makes a site fully accessible. But I believe Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have an obligation to push this field forward and make it an issue that affects a websites exposure and ultimately its profitability.
I’d be interested to hear anyone elses opinion on the subject, so what’s your view?