Karma & Web Design
When asking the average web developer where they rank accessibility & web standards in importance, you are likely to find a lot of items in their todo list above them. Ask them why they rank so low and…
“Why waste our time on that? There is much more important stuff to do!”
“Web standards? The user doesn’t care what’s behind the web page, just how it looks in their browser!”
“Usability? I’m not going to waste my time making sure a tiny percentage of the population can read my site!”
Sound familiar?
Well like many things in life, when you do something right, even though the immediate benefits may not be apparent, something always makes it worth your time. For some time now web standards advocates have been pushing the SEO benefits of using correct XHTML and CSS in your web pages. And it’s true, a standards compliant web page benefits purely because the search engines are able to look at the content without the formatting getting in the way. It’s not a massive benefit over older non compliant designs, but it is there.
With accessibility, the benefits are even harder to see, until you look a little deeper. Yet again, SEO is the immediate benefit. In fact, as Andy Hagans points out, if you look at Google’s Webmaster Guidelines you will find a striking similarity between many of their points and the accessibility guidelines.
I’ve only really looked at SEO here; it is becoming more and more of an issue as the number of web sites in the world escalates, so I believe this is a major selling point of accessibility & web standards. But if you want a real reason, karma is it. Any time you make the effort to cover these mostly forgotten aspects of web design, you make your site more appealing to both your users and the search engines. That colour blind blogger (8% of the population) is more likely to link to you, that blind user is more likely to mention you in their pod cast, eventually it all adds up.
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