Often zero consideration is given to disabled or impaired users of the internet. Government Acts, such as Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act and various other legislation requires federal agencies to be handicapped-accessable. Unfortunately, U.S businesses have been slow to catch up. Approximately 15% of the American population has some sort of disability or impairment. Aside from the moral and ethical reasons why websites should be accessible, 15% is quite a large market of people to ignore.

It is important to note that when discussing disabilities we are discussing more then blindness, we are also addressing visually impaired users, users with tunnel vision, far sightedness, hearing impaired and those who are physically disabled. Disabilities cross multiple generation, sub-cultures and income levels and therefore there is a high likelihood that disabled users have tried to access your company's website at some point.

Why there is a problem

Many interactive agencies ignore important and critical areas like usability, content structure and content organization. Each of these areas are core components of good design and development practices. Without these practices accessibility becomes impossible to implement. Try using a screen reader (http:// www-306.ibm.com/able/solution_offerings/hpr.html) to access your website and you might be suprised how tough it is to navigate. Screen readers grab just the text and links in a site, very much like the early pre-browser days of the internet. When graphics, color, boldness and type-face treatments are removed content organization and structure becomes king.

How to fix the problem

Use screen readers to navigate your website, it will greatly help in understanding how those with disabilities navigate. It will certainly make you more sensitive to using ALT text and text based alternative navigation. Added benefit, it will help you in those coveted search results.