Andy Hagans, of Tropical SEO sat down with me to talk accessibility.
Unbeknownst to most, accessibility is actually Andy’s third love (first is his mother, second is SEO). Andy is somewhat of a perfectionist which lends well to his accessibility skills because it can be a very time consuming task that requires a lot of little fixes. Accessibility is often overlooked when planning or improving website usability, but it in fact is the basic building block of usability. Andy provides his thoughts below:
Accessibility and usability are joined at the hip. If someone can’t access your website, they can’t even begin to use it successfully.
ConvertUp: Does making your site accessible make it more SEO friendly? Andy: Ha, funny you should ask. I contributed Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (and note that achieving even Level 1 compliance puts a web page above 99% of what’s out there). ConvertUp.com: Can you give some tips to help people get started making their site more accessible right away? Andy: Sure. First, I always like to do two things to show people how inaccessible their current site is: number one, bump up your font size a few times in your browser. This is what some of your visually impaired users are looking at. Still proud of your design? Number two, turn off stylesheets and browse your site. Still proud of your markup and content organization?The good news is, this stuff isn’t rocket science, and you can learn the basics in a week: start with Comments
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