Accessibility

The web standards movement is basically a set of guidelines to help ensure that everyone can access and enjoy all the information available on the internet. This applies to people with disabilities such as blindness or poor eyesight as well as people using the many types of hand-held devices (like Blackberries) to be able to browse the web as easily as those using home computers.

There are other reasons than just accessibility that makes using web standards practical for web developers. When these standards are followed search engines can do a better job of indexing the pages, they give developers more time and flexibility and they will help ensure that older browsers will still be able to display the content on the pages. You want to make sure that your web pages are accessible in as many different browsers as possible. Having web standards will also help with validating your web pages which helps with finding errors in the code. Also documents that are compliant can be converted to different formats easier.

Different browsers can interpret web pages differently; therefore, it is important to code your pages the best way possible to ensure that your pages can be read in all browsers. They may appear a little different depending on the browser; however, it is important that anyone can access the information available regardless of what browser they use.

At Huron Shores Design we strive to create web pages that meet the web accessibility guidelines as outlined by the W3C (Worldwide Web Consortium).

References:

Accessibility Image. Retrieved on June 15, 2009. http://webaccess.tamu.edu/images/productLogos.jpg