An Untapped Pool of Visitors… Get Them For Free!

A few months ago, SiteReference – a website which provides tutorials and other resources for web developers – published an article about an untapped source of traffic. Of course, we were all ears. After all, the more traffic a website gets, the more successful it can be.

So who are these visitors? People with disabilities.

Apparently, the majority of websites are inaccessable to people who have disabilities. And given that the number of people with disabilites is an estimated 54 million, you could be alienating a huge market.

So how can you make your website more accessible?

You can start by thinking of the things that may make a website hard to use. For example, some things that might stop a person with a disability from using a website include:

• unfriendly color combinations – Perhaps the text is either too faint or in a harsh color.
• minimize image text – Sometimes, we use images to replace text. But for disabled persons who are browsing with a simple text browser, they will be unable to read all content.
• difficult navigation – It is also important to ensure that all users can navigate your website. Do so by creating a website that does not NEED to be navigated via the use of a mouse. For all of you out there who have flash or ajax navigational elements, you will need to find an HTML alternative.

Additional Tips…

For additional information on making your website fully accessible to ALL of your visitors, see the original article here.