A Business Imperative
In today’s world, the Websites are the digital “front door” to businesses and non-profits. Unfortunately, many websites are inaccessible to people with disabilities.
Businesses that have put in ramps and elevators, and offer Braille signs and large print menus, have generally not created websites that are useable by people with disabilities. As a result, the new “front door’ of these businesses are inaccessible to the disability community.
The Web has the potential for extraordinary access to information for people with disabilities. Barriers that existed in print, audio, and visual media can be easily overcome through Web technologies. As an example, when the primary way to get information was to go to a library and read it on paper, there were significant barriers for many people with disabilities. These included:
- getting to the library (difficult for people in wheelchairs, blind people)
- physically getting the resource (reaching the top shelf is difficult from a wheelchair)
- reading the resource (impossible to do when you’re blind )
The Center for Accessible Technology (CforAT) provides consulting services to address these issues. Often, the fixes are small and easy to make, but they have a huge impact on the ability of people with disabilities to use websites.