Accessibility is an important but often neglected issue in website design. There are many websites in existence that can not be used by people who have a visual impairment, or those using less up-to-date hardware and software. In many cases, these problems could have been avoided if they had been anticipated and addressed at the design stage.

In the early days of the web, browsers only displayed text. Only a very small proportion of today's users are working with text-only browsers, so it might not seem worth the trouble of designing a site that is accessible to this user group. However, there will also be people with visual impairments using screen readers, which convert text to audio, and a page that can't be read by a text-only browser will not work with a screen reader, either.

The importance you attach to accessibility issues will depend to a certain extent on who your website is aimed at. Organisations concerned with provision of information to the public, or which are in some sense publicly accountable should give particular consideration to these issues. If you already produce large print, audio or braille versions of your literature, you will no doubt appreciate the benefits of producing a web page that can be accessed in any of these ways.

For further information about accessibility issues, visit the Web Accessibility Initiative website. We use tools such as Bobby to check for accessibility and the W3C HTML Validation Service to ensure valid HTML.