Tips for making accessible websites

In my blog, I have often mentioned the importance of website usability and website user experience. At OpenView Venture Partners, we believe that to achieve great growth, expansion stage companies should focus on making their website the channel that delivers the best marketing message, customer communication and enables the best customer experience. Thus, homepage design and web application interface design are essential components of a successful go to market strategy. Moreover, the earlier companies get started on improving usability and user experience, the more time they get to perfect those important aspects of their product management process, and the easier it is for them to continue to innovate and make the customer experience better.

However, I have not mentioned another relevant aspect of homepage and application interface design, which is “accessibility”. Accessibility is actually even more fundamental than usability and elegant design, because it is more absolutely a requirement than a “nice to have”, and because it is much clearer to see whether a website is accessible to all potential users, while usability can be subjective and relative.

Fortunately, there are already a lot of resources online to help companies do accessibility testing on their website and improve it accordingly. The article “How Accessible is Your website?” by Josh Reyes at Spyrestudios is a good place to start. It has a list of free tools that webmasters can use to test different accessibility requirements, such as vision deficiency, readability of text or dead links.

And if you find it hard to convince your colleagues or clients about the importance of Accessibility for their websites, please check out this article: 10 Reasons Clients Don’t Care About Accessibility. It is important to know why people are skeptical about this, and how to convince them otherwise.