Accessibility and search engine optimisation

Navicarta recommends that its clients seek to make their websites accessible to the widest possible audience, including those ‘browsing’ the web using alternative technologies such as those used by people with various disabilities (eg large-print or audio browsers for those with visual impairments) as well as internet-enabled mobile phones, PDAs, and so forth. This recommendation is a point of principle, though it also meets the requirements of disability discrimination legislation throughout the world.

The best way of ensuring this is to comply as far as possible with the guidelines of the Web Accessibility Initiative, which includes such things as using only structural/semantic elements in HTML code and separating out all design features into Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) files, as well as ensuring that alternate text is available for all graphical elements.

As search engines like Google will ‘read’ the website in much the same way as a special browser for the visually impaired would, search engine optimisation (SEO) is also directly related to making the website accessible at the design level.

Key also to SEO is the use of appropriate social media outlets, especially indexed services such as Twitter, and as part of web development projects we will make recommendations for best practice in terms of SEO and website promotion.