Business Benefits of Web Standards and Accessibility
Developing accessible websites has many advantages, both technical and business-related. Below, I share my perspective on the economic and business reasons for developing in this manner. More concretely, what do our customers really gain from accessibility and web standards?
Estimating how much money or "goodwill" you earn by doing things one way compared to another is always tricky, especially since you often only realize one of the approaches. But the choice becomes simple when there are ways that provide greater access to information while simultaneously making it easier for everyone to engage with it without incurring additional costs.
What do we mean by standards and accessibility?
Given the many different development approaches available for the web today, modern methods differ significantly from outdated ones. Most importantly, today, we can use HTML as it was intended to structure information while also creating beautiful details and focusing on design through techniques adapted for this purpose. In the rapidly expanding web landscape, we can’t afford to compromise on either.
But what concrete benefits does it offer you as a customer if your website is constructed using standards? What do you or your company gain by ensuring it is developed to be accessible to as many people as possible?
An accessible website benefits not only individuals with physical disabilities (as many unfortunately seem to believe) but also those with slightly impaired vision who would like to increase the text size, those browsing the web with their mobile phones, those using older computers and software, and everyone else who doesn’t have a fast internet connection. Moreover, it provides a significantly better experience for all those who, for various reasons, do not surf the web like most others (those who are blind, color-blind, have motor difficulties, etc.) as a pure bonus.
Concrete examples of the benefits of accessibility and standards
Here’s a list of the advantages you can benefit from—without increasing development time—if you hire someone knowledgeable in their field. These are primarily business-related benefits; if you are more interested in the technical advantages, you can read about them in our other articles.
- The website becomes easier to update and expand or modify later. Separating design, content, and behavior makes the website easier to work with, facilitating development and maintenance.
- Your headings, texts, and tables retain their structural meaning. Even Google knows what constitutes a heading and what body text is. Additionally, if you store the information in a database or another practical way, you can easily reuse the information on other occasions. And, if you’re not satisfied with your current collaboration, it’s easy to transfer the information to the next provider, reducing your dependency on a specific supplier.
- Pages load faster, and the technology is utilized more efficiently. Semantic HTML results in smaller pages, while external CSS and JavaScript files are cached in the user's memory.
- You can design a single source of information differently depending on whether the text is displayed on screen, printed on paper, or shown on a mobile phone. With CSS, you can define different style sheets for the same content, eliminating redundancy and allowing you to update it in one place.
- Building structured websites with quality content using web standards is the best way to create opportunities for advanced positioning in search engines like Google or Bing. A page built with a focus on accessibility benefits all visitors, including search engine spiders that index the web. Google is often called the web's most prominent "blind visitor."
- More visitors. For the reasons mentioned above, better search engine placement should increase traffic, right?
- Your website works much better across various browsers and platforms. By defining the page's HTML standard, the browser can render the page as the developer intended, resulting in greater compatibility between different browsers and operating systems.
Legislation
In many countries, including the USA and Canada, laws already require that all governmental websites meet the accessibility criteria outlined in Section 508. In England, since March 2006, a "Publicly Available Specification" (PAS78) has been in place, which has roughly the same goals.
In Sweden, there are also excellent and up-to-date guidelines available today. The guidance "24-hour web" includes guidelines for developing web and e-services in the public sector and describes problem areas, solutions, and recommendations. Of course, just because these guidelines were designed for the public sector doesn’t prevent companies from using them to create more modern, efficient, and accessible websites.
In conclusion
Web standards and accessible websites offer not only technical benefits but also a range of economic advantages. The benefits presented above are just a few examples.
The conclusion remains the same: there are concrete examples of accessibility's business and economic advantages—it’s just a matter of knowing enough to explain these to your customers effectively.