While the topic of website accessibility is not new, the the increasing sophistication of website content and the expanding number of internet users makes it more important than ever. If you are at all unsure of what “accessibility” means for a website, at least from a U.S. perspective, you should check out the U.S. Government’s Section 508 website. While accessibility does not refer to internationalization of website content, it seems to me that by designing website content to meet accessibility standards, this will help an organization adapt its website to international audiences.
The people who can benefit from an accessible website include those with vision and hearing impairments as well as those over the age of 65. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s projections, the older population in the United States is on the threshold of a boom. They estimate that some 20 percent of the U.S. population will be over 65 by 2030. You find additional population data for countries worldwide at the AARP website.
This information can certainly help a company or organization plan for how it needs to structure its website content for varying age groups as well as nationalities (i.e., language requirements). By planning for an aging and more diverse, international population using the internet, organizations can reach more people and potential clients. For international development organizations, reaching more people in host-country languages can make it easier to both do business with foreign governments and reach expatriate citizens who might be inclined to support projects that
Accessibility in general is a sound web design practice since a fundamental principle of the internet is universal access to information. A person’s ability to access online content should not be inhibited by poor design that ignores people who have vision, hearing or other physical impairments. The challenge, of course, is to develop websites that meet accesibility guidelines without requiring excessive costs for development and testing.
In most cases, web accessibility requires you (at a minimum) to design your website with particular attention to web standards and using HTML to structure your site while applying CSS for the “look and feel.” This means better planning and control of the content you are presenting online. Fortunately, there is a growing awareness of the need to build accessible websites. Accessify is an excellent starting point for finding tools and techniques that can improve the accesibility of a website. From there, it is definitely worthwhile looking at the Web Standards Project to learn more about building standards-compliant sites and why this makes sense.