ACCESSIBILITY AND ACCESSIBLE WEB DESIGN.

People are often bamboozled by the concept of accessible web design. They stare at the words blankly, nonplussed, imagining that what they signify must be frightfully difficult to understand and that it is entirely justifiable to pay someone a massive amount of money in order to sort out their web site. But that is, quite frankly, a big pile of nonsense.

ACCESSIBILITY IS, ERM, ACCESSIBLE.

Accessible web design is just that - accessible. It really is that simple. It's about ensuring that all of the content on the page is available to everyone regardless of the method by which they access the page. You only need to think of the different ways in which you personally might access the Internet - through a mobile phone, or on a browser designed for a games console for instance - to grasp the concept that your site needs to be flexible enough to accommodate the needs of different audiences.

THE HAIR-SHIRT SCHOOL OF WEB DESIGN.

You'll find a lot of people on the internet take that to mean all accessible web design should be as simple and sparse as possible; that raw, unadorned text is the order of the day - but that just simply isn't true. These advocates of uber-simplicity are akin to the puritans of old, decrying any form of decoration or design as indulgent and unnecessary, not stopping to think that, actually, in many instances, a visual clue about a site's content can be just as useful as a written description. A picture is worth a thousand words, after all.

Furthermore, in their quest to strip bare the pages of the web, these new digital puritans have forgotten the central tenant of accessibility - graceful degradation. This is when you use a particular technology on your site to create an impactful experience (say a small Flash animation, for example), but you take special care to ensure that if a user wishes to disable that particular feature, or if their browser doesn't support it, they can "step down" to a method that still allows access to the basic content of the site, albeit in a less stimulating way.

This means that generally, to the untrained eye, there's no real difference between an inaccessible site and an accessible site. This is because the differences lie beneath - in how a site is built. As experts in the field of accessibility and usability, +GOOD is instinctively aware of considerations to be taken into account when planning and building a web site - so get in touch today and let's get accessible.