Profiting Ideas

Making your site more Accessible

Now, some of you may ask why would you take the time to make your site more accesible to all user? Actually, by doing so not only you are doing a good favor for the visually impaired community, it will also make your site easily crawled by bots.

And what can you do to make your sites more accessible?

Google webmasters has been developing a special search tool called Google Accessible Search located in http://labs.google.com/accessible/

This search, tends to favor pages that degrade gracefully: pages with few visual distractions and that are likely to render well with images turned off. Flashing banners and dancing animals are probably the worst thing you could put on your site if you want its content to be read by an adaptive technology like a screen reader.

Here are some basic tips from Google Webmasters:

1. Keep web pages easy to read, avoiding visual clutter and ensuring that the primary purpose of the web page is immediately accessible with full keyboard navigation.
2. There are many organizations and online resources that offer website owners and authors guidance on how to make websites and pages more accessible for the blind and visually impaired. The W3C publishes numerous guidelines including Web Content Access Guidelines that are helpful for website owners and authors.
3. As with regular search, the best thing you can do with respect to making your site rank highly is to create unique, compelling content. In fact, you can think of the Google crawler as the world’s most influential blind user. The content that matters most to the Googlebot is the content that matters most to the blind user: good, quality text.
4. It’s also worth reviewing your content to see how accessible it is for other end users. For example, try browsing your site on a monochrome display or try using your site without a mouse. You may also consider your site’s usability through a mobile device like a Blackberry or iPhone.