Is Your Website Accessible to Everyone?

Websites are purposed as a touch base for visitors. Whether you sell widgets or offer services, your website is your front desk.

What happens if your website does not accommodate your visitors to the fullest? You will end up losing trust from your visitors, and your website will eventually meet its end.

A knol about universal design principles by Kel Smith, the Principal of Anikto LLC, a user-centered design and web accessibility company, explain that every web designer and developer should apply universal design principles. This principles allows websites to be accessible not only to people who have disabilities, but also to everyone.

There are seven universal design principles, according to Kel Smith:

1. Equitable Use – The design is useful and marketable to people with diverse abilities.
2. Flexibility in Use – The design accommodates a wide range of individual preferences and abilities.
3. Simple and Intuitive – Use of the design is easy to understand, regardless of the user’s experience, knowledge, language skills, or current concentration level.
4. Perceptible Information – The design communicates necessary information effectively to the user, regardless of ambient conditions or the user’s sensory abilities.
5. Tolerance for Error – The design minimizes hazards and the adverse consequences of accidental or unintended actions.
6. Low Physical Effort – The design can be used efficiently, comfortably and with a minimum of fatigue.
7. Size and Space for Approach and Use – Appropriate size and space is provided for approach, reach, manipulation, and use regardless of user’s body size, posture, or mobility.

Kel Smith indicated in his knol that potential problems in practicing the seven principles will come in the form of usability versus accessibility.

He wrote that web designers and developers are struggling to balance between the usability and accessibility of the websites – find the perfect balance is the key success factor for a successful website.

Although not easy, meeting those principles, along with balancing the usability and accessibility, will likely to win or convert more people to your website purposes.

I think of universal design principles as the ‘Ten Commandments’ written on stones that should guide web designers and developers in creating a website that is not only usable, but accessible.