Web Accessibility FAQ's

Web Accessibility Benefits People With and Without Disabilities

The following shows how web accessibility promotes access for:

• Older People
• People with Low Literacy and People Not Fluent in the Language
• People with Low Bandwidth Connections to the Internet, and Older Technologies
• New and Infrequent Web Users

While the main focus of Web accessibility is people with disabilities, accessibility also benefits people without disabilities. The Increased Web Site Use section of the W3C's Financial Factors lists aspects of Web accessibility that increase usability, thus also benefiting people without disabilities. People with temporary disabilities — for example, from an accident or illness — also benefit from Web accessibility.

Web accessibility provides improved access, and thus can increase social inclusion, for other groups of people that are often a focus of corporate social responsibility. Below are examples of how Web accessibility benefits others.

See the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Overview for more information.

Access for Older People

While older people often experience changes in vision, hearing, dexterity, and memory as they age, they might not consider themselves to have disabilities. Yet the accessibility provisions that make the Web accessible also benefit older people with diminishing abilities. For example, many people with age-related visual deterioration can benefit from:

• sufficient contrast between foreground and background colours
• text size defined as relative units (rather than absolute units), so they can progressively increase the text size in a regular site, as opposed to using a very differently designed text-only site or assistive technology
• text and markup rather than bitmap images of text to convey information
• text that does not blink or move

People with difficulty using the mouse benefit from:

• device independence that lets them use the keyboard, rather than having to use the mouse, for all Web site interaction

Access for People with Low Literacy and People Not Fluent in the Language

Accessible Web sites can benefit people with low literacy levels and people who are not fluent in the language of the Web site. Specifically, many of the aspects of Web accessibility for people with cognitive disabilities help people who do not know the language well, including:

• clear and simple language as appropriate
• supplemental illustrations
• clear and consistent design, navigation, and links
• blocks of information divided into groups
• text that does not blink or move

In addition, accessible sites can be read by screen readers so people who cannot read can benefit from listening to sites.

Access for People with Low Bandwidth Connections to the Internet, and Older Technologies

Some aspects of Web accessibility benefit people with low bandwidth connections. Low bandwidth can be due to:

• location — for example, rural
• bandwidth congestion
• connection technology — for example, mobile phone or personal data assistant (PDA)
• financial situation — that is, cannot afford high-speed connection

Some older technologies load pages very slowly and do not support features used on newer sites.

People with low bandwidth connections and older technologies can benefit from:

• redundant coding for information conveyed with colour, and sufficient contrast between foreground and background colours — for people who have black and white monitors
• text descriptions of images, when they turn off images to speed download, and text alternatives for multimedia — for people whose older technology cannot access new multimedia formats and people whose connections are too low to download multimedia files
• text size defined as relative units — for older browsers that do not override absolute text sizes
• text and markup rather than bitmap images of text to convey information, which can increase download speed
• style sheets used effectively to separate content from presentation, which can decrease file size and file download requirements thus increasing download speed
• sites that are organized so they can be read without style sheets, because some older technologies cannot handle style sheets (accessible pages can use style sheets and still be usable when style sheets are not supported)
• sites that use valid W3C technologies, and are thus more likely to work on older technologies
• sites that are usable when scripts, applets, or other programmatic objects are turned off or not supported
• clear and consistent design, navigation, and links, which helps users open the pages they want and helps save wasted page loading time from users going down the wrong path

Access for New and Infrequent Web Users

Some people have little opportunity to use the Web because of the socioeconomic issues mentioned previously. New and infrequent Web users benefit from aspects of accessibility such as:

• clear and consistent design, navigation, and links
• providing redundant text links for image maps
• informing users of new, spawned browser windows

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