22 March 2006

Online accessibility and search engine optimisation - the beginning of a beautiful relationship?

It has been an interesting week for SEO companies, with the recent release of new accessibility guidelines by the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) - in collaboration with the British Standards Institution (BSI) - resulting in increased interest from the online community over the issue of website accessibility and optimisation.

The BSI PAS 78 document that was produced (http://www.bsi-global.com / ICT / PAS78 / index.xalter) advocates a number of technical changes that can be made to most websites without altering the user experience for fully able people, but which will then be accessible to those with a disability and who try to access the website using assistive technologies. These technologies typically involve using a screenreader of some description, though other technologies that commonly occur are: screen magnification plugins; touch-screen, language simplified interfaces; braille outputting browsers; and signing avatars. A list of commonly used assistive browsing technologies can be found on the W3C site (http://www.w3.org / WAI / References / Browsing).

One of the featured implementations that the BSI document encourages is the use of live testing for standards compliance in addition to using online tools. A BBC report this week noted the business import of catering to these new guidelines (http://news.bbc.co.uk / 1 / hi / technology / 4816118.stm), while the Guardian, too, has picked up on the story (http://technology.guardian.co.uk / weekly / story / 0,,1731405,00.html?gusrc=rss). The press interest suggests that there will be some support for any movement made on these new guidelines and, we at bigmouthmedia believe that while once there was only a vague hope that businesses would sit up and pay attention, this time around there's a really good chance for change. Why? Search engine result page (SERP) rankings have become seriously important in the online marketplace and following the accessibility guidelines will help a website's SERP ranking. It's good practice to follow the new BSI guidelines, but it's also good business sense.

It should be noted that the online world has no definitive set of specifications for compliance with the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA), as no legal precedent has yet been established, but recommendations such as those made by the W3C (www.w3.org / TR / WCAG / ) and the new BSI guidelines aim to provide the base for a future, legally applicable web standard. Currently, as many as 80% of websites fail to comply with even basic accessibility issues and, though this figure is likely to decrease, legal motivation may well be needed to implement the changes required for full website accessibility more quickly. Getting your site in order in advance will do you no harm.

Bigmouthmedia has often pointed to the optimisation benefits to be gained from following accessibility optimisation guidelines, as inevitably the practice will result in a site's improved accessibility to search engine spiders as well as the 10% of the online population for who have a disability of some kind. We have even put our own thoughts on compliance out there with this, widely used, resource: (http://www.bigmouthmedia.com / downloads / files / search-engine-optimisation-accessibility.pdf). Also, look for an updated version to be online soon as we can confirm that there is a significant update of the bigmouthmedia guidelines in development at this very moment!

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