Why should disabled people be unable to use the internet?

As one of the best SEO companies in the country, we know how important it is not only make our sites as optimised as possible, but also to make them as disability-friendly as we can.

UK businesses with a website have been legally obliged to make them accessible for disabled users since 1999. Currently we have optimised our site for deaf users and also the visually impaired, with a little mp3 feature called ‘Listen’ that allows a user to listen to the pages as well as reading. But what else can we do?

Businesses with accessible websites can tap into the estimated £80bn spent by people with disabilities, which leaves us with a few questions and possibilities to consider when it comes to optimising a site. Is there a standard programme to use for text sizing, for example? There is a lot to consider when optimizing a site for disabled users and at Creare we believe we are on the right track.

Making a website disability-friendly is becoming a bigger issue for more and more companies these days. There are a lot of tricks to do with web design, but what about search engine optimisation (SEO)?

Links are a huge part of SEO- they can optimise websites by linking them to other industry related sites. But how can links make a website disability-friendly as well as SEO friendly?

Imagine you have a pie chart or some sort of graph on your site that gives vital information about your company. Graphs and so on can be confusing for partially-sighted people, especially with the detail and colours. A good idea to solve this problem would be putting a link underneath the image that directs the user towards another page where the information in the pie chart is given in a simple text format only. It makes it easier for the user to read and can also help your SEO; make the page of text keyword rich, and your site is also automatically optimised.