How Many Blind, Deaf, Cripples Visit Your Website?

Websites have to be accessible. You need to follow the WCAG guidelines, make sure that any user can fully access your site, through a screen reader and a Braille keyboard. People who are unable to use a mouse with precision need to be catered for. Video needs close captioning to cater to the hard of hearing. Given the focus on all these needs, and their general acceptance of the need to implement these accessibility standards, I’m surprised that the blind, the deaf and the disabled aren’t a massive majority of internet users.

There’s a very narrow view of web accessibility, and it’s a view that caters to a tiny percentage of internet users. Rather than taking a holistic approach to the topic, both designers and clients overemphasize a checklist of supposed accessibility features. They should instead be focusing on a wider view of accessibility.

What Percentage Of Visitors Do You Support?

Everyone wants to stop support of Internet Explorer 6. If the number of IE6 users on a website drops below 10%, perhaps that’s time to stop support. Maybe it’s 5%, maybe it’s as low as 1%.

Those who require a screen reader, or closed captioning, or manual assistance to use most websites are probably less than 1% of general visitors. I’d guess they’re *certainly* less than 5%. If those were users of a specific browser we’d be talking about abandoning support. So why do we bend over backwards to support such a tiny proportion of these users?

Sometimes You Need To Support

I’ve worked for public sector clients, and they have a legal requirement to ensure their websites are fully accessible to the visually, physically or hearing impaired. There’s obvious reasons for that, they’re providing a public service that needs to be available to all. In some countries private companies need to ensure their sites are similarly accessible. Of course if you have a legal requirement to ensure this type of accessibility, then you need to fulfil that.

Sometimes You Don’t

I don’t really care that much if my website is accessible to the visually impaired, or the physically disabled. I write clean and valid code, but largely because it’s good practice to do so and, once you get in the habit, easier than hacking. I’m not going to exert specific effort on an audience that’s irrelevant to me.

I don’t feel a moral duty to provide this kind of accessibility for my own site. I provide it insofar as it matches my general design and coding practice, but that’s it. I wouldn’t support users of a specific browser if they made up a tiny percentage of my audience and required special effort. Exactly the same applies to any other group of users.

“Accessibility” Doesn’t Mean Accessibility

There’s a big difference between the narrow definition of accessible and the wider meaning of the word. It’s very possible to make a site that checks all the relevant boxes of web accessibility guidelines, and still be ugly and difficult to use. It’s more than possible, in fact, it’s pretty much the norm for public sector websites around the world. They’re a living demonstration of why checking off items on a list is no substitute for making a site widely accessible and usable.

I want websites to be *usable*. Usable is a more important definition than the narrow list of what makes a site “accessible”. That incorporates clean code and validation of semantic markup, so it covers most of the bases of “accessibility”, but it’s not the main focus. Usability is about making a website design easy for the most people possible. “Accessibility” is all too often about making a site equally unfriendly for all.