Accessiblity and SEO: or, why accessible websites are not for the disabled
Posted: May 31st, 2007 | Author: admin | Filed under: accessibility, search accessibility, seo, webdev | 2 Comments »So I was at the @media America conference last week. There was much talk of accessibility and how to do it properly, when to do it, and even when not to do it. There was also talk about why to do it, but that’s where I think the speakers dropped the ball. Accessibility is not about helping disabled people: it’s about money, and you making more of it. (I’m going to use a lot of bold text in this post to emphasize stuff. That’s because it’s long, and you’re skim-reading. See, I know you.)
Accessibility: because it’s the Right Thing™?
The dirty secret of accessibility, swept under the rug by many an evangelist, is that the cost of making your site accessible is relatively high: in my experience, something like 20% additional dev time on a new project, although experienced developers can bring this down, and the cost decreases dramatically for incremental updates once the project is up and running. But a 20% margin is definitely non-trivial. And if you’ve not been thinking in terms of accessibility from the start, this pricetag rises sharply: retrofitting accessibility often involves fundamentally reworking the architecture of a web page*. You’ll be looking at spending something like 50% of the time you spent originally developing the site on the retrofit. Ouch.
The other dirty secret of accessibility is that the number of disabled users is relatively low. Not tiny, but I often hear figures like “60% of Americans are disabled”, and while this is true, it’s disingenuous because that figure can include people like amputees or paraplegics who can use the web with no problems whatsoever. The truth is that somewhere between 10% and a maximum of 20% of your users will have trouble using your site without assistive technologies. This makes it a very close call, when starting a new project — serving 80% of your possible users doesn’t seem ideal, but is an acceptable loss to get it out of the door 20% faster, right? You can build the accessibility in later!
Except you can’t. After launch, you’ve got an inaccessible site and you’re facing a 50% dev time bill to retrofit that acessibility in: another 3 weeks on what was a 6-week project, just to get 20% more users? That makes no business sense: much better to build another project, and get another 80% of users in the door quickly.
This is the kind of unavoidable math that has made the web inaccessible today. And that’s the harsh truth: building in accessibility for disabled users does not make business sense. It’s still a good idea, a noble idea, but it’s not a financially sound one. This is true in the real world, too, which is why legislation was necessary to force everybody to put accessible toilets and wheelchairs in everywhere.
Accessibility: because you could get sued?
Of course, legislators have (eventually) worked out this problem, and as such there is already web accessibility legislation in place in many countries that makes it illegal to produce an inaccessible website. Problem solved! It’s the law! We have to do it! Right?
In an ideal world, yes. In the real world, the law is only patchily enforced. Only a few very large, very high-profile sites have been sued so far (plus some government sites). You can always fly under the radar, hope nobody notices, and not build in accessibility until they sue you. It’s a good gamble to make to avoid increasing the cost of your site by 50%, right? Again, the math defeats us.
But this is all very unsatisfying. You, the clever, compassionate, standards-compliant modern web developer, feel that this cold logic is intrinsically, morally wrong. So you make the case for accessibility: you try to inflate disabled user numbers (counterproductive; it will make your manager trust you less) and deflate the amount of time it will take to make it accessible (an even worse idea; now you’re missing deadlines because of “that damn accessibility stuff”, making your manager hate the whole idea).
So here’s how you, as a developer, can stay true to your noble impulses to build an elegant, accessible website: stop calling it accessibility.
SEO: Open up, Google is coming!
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the hot shit right now. Google is the Internet for a lot of people, and if Google can’t find it, then it doesn’t exist. Nobody goes deep-diving on a site to try and dig up information anymore. Either they type in their search terms and your site comes up with exactly what they need on that page, or they will never click your link. Sites these days get 50-90% of their traffic from search engines**, and the overwhelming majority of that is deep links to pages within the site.
So it’s absolutely imperative that search engines be able to access your site, and this isn’t just keywords on your home page: Google must be able to get at every single page of the site, every nook and cranny, and see every little bit of information. A site that can’t be indexed is throwing away up to 90% of its audience. In other words, this traffic is lost by sites that are not search-accessible. And there’s an interesting word in that phrase.
Search Accessibility: because you’d be an idiot not to
Here’s the final dirty little secret of this situation: Google is a disabled user. Or more accurately, Google has all the same limitations of somebody using assistive technologies:
- It doesn’t look at pictures
- It does not execute any Javascript
- It isn’t reading every bit of text on your page; it is looking for the important bits
Suddenly, the equation changes: at least 55% of your users need your site to be accessible, and possibly over 90% do. Only 10-20% of them need it to be accessible all the time, but that doesn’t matter, because up to 90% of your users will never even visit your site if it isn’t search accessible. This isn’t out of solidarity, or legislation. They simply won’t find it. Search accessibility is not an optional component, to be bolted on after the main launch. Chances are, if you haven’t got your search accessibility right, there will never be a second launch, because your site will fail.
How can I further underline the importance of search accessibility to a web-based business? Let’s turn the numbers around: you can more than double traffic to your website by making it search accessible. Does that sound like something you could take to your manager as a business case? Keep in mind, 50% traffic from search engines is an absolute minimum. If you’re getting 90% of your traffic from Google, then making yourself search accessible will result in a tenfold increase in traffic. Those sorts of numbers are why SEO is now big business, with a whole industry built around paying consultants to tell you how to get it right. That industry wouldn’t exist if they weren’t getting results.
But you don’t need to pay somebody. Once you’ve got the big, obvious business case out of the way, and swallowed the bitter pill that doing things properly will take 20% longer, search accessibility is super-easy. For my own personal how-to for search accessibility, see my next post.
* For example, if you’ve put a lot of business logic into JavaScript to enable Ajax goodness, making it accessible often means moving this logic to the server-side, which means reimplementing in a different language entirely, which is terribly expensive. You can write Ajax accessibly, so that business logic is always on the server and Ajax is merely a bridge, but you have to be thinking about it from the start. And as we’ve already established, you didn’t do that.
** This figure is affected by the type of site, and the levels of traffic to that site. So your blog might get half its traffic from regular readers, but on an e-commerce site the figure is going to be 90%.