Accessible Internet refers to measures that are intended to ensure that all users have equally unrestricted access to online resources. This primarily concerns two areas: on the one hand, the technical possibilities available to a user and, on the other, the user's physical and mental abilities, which depend, among other things, on age and health criteria. In many cases, however, an accessible website offers advantages even to users with the best technical equipment and the highest personal capabilities. In addition, accessible websites are often also more "readable" for search engines. Therefore, the accessible design is also a proven means if you want to improve your homepage or website want to optimize to improve ranking or increase conversion rate.
What does barrier-free mean for web design and web hosting?
When discussing the specific characteristics of an accessible Internet, it should first be noted that these also change with the technical development of the Internet. New elements in web design can create new hurdles, but also facilitate accessible design. A major shift was the transition from the largely text-based information of the early Internet to an increasingly graphic medium, brought about by the introduction of the World Wide Web in 1991. While it is said that a picture is worth a thousand words, this is only true if the recipient of the message can decode the visual information. However, this requirement is not met more often than you might think. For example, the robots that search engines use to fill their databases can only extract very limited information from images. However, web page content in text form can also be read aloud by computer programs, so-called screen readers, for example, and mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets now also offer comparable functionalities as standard. Text-based content is therefore indispensable if your homepage is to be barrier-free. Fortunately, the page description language used on the web, HTML, offers simple ways to supplement visual content, such as images, with information in text form that does not change the normal appearance of your homepage, no matter what development tools your web hosting provider has ready. For example, the so-called alt tag of an image, which you note in the HTML source code, is only displayed if the image itself cannot be displayed. This can be caused by very different reasons. For example, it is possible that temporary bottlenecks or interruptions in the Internet connection prevent an image from loading. The visual contents are usually not directly in the HTML source code of an websitebut are added as external resources. Therefore, incorrect referencing can also cause the absence of images. The display of graphical content can also be deliberately suppressed by the user or not even supported by the browser. Furthermore, search engines also evaluate the content of the alt tags in order to be able to provide meaningful answers to search queries.
What you should pay attention to in web hosting for barrier-free Internet
The change in the framework conditions for a barrier-free Internet does not only concern such fundamental changes as the shift of emphasis from textual to visual representation. Details, such as font size settings, are also affected. A text that you can read perfectly when designing your website may therefore be too small or even too large for a visitor to your homepage for technical reasons alone. In addition, there are individual requirements for the font size, which are particularly due to restrictions in the user's vision. One of the first measures aimed at providing barrier-free access to web offerings was therefore controls for changing the font size. These can be found especially in the web hosting of public and official offers. In the meantime, web browsers generally offer universal possibilities for font size adjustment. These have the advantage that they can be used in the same way on all websites. A user who needs them does not have to search the site to find out whether, where and how it offers its own font size setting. Therefore, such elements are no longer decisive for assessing the accessibility of a web presence.
On the other hand, it is still important that you allow the users of your website the freedom to decide how the pages are displayed to suit their personal requirements. Unfortunately, this basic requirement of an accessible web design is also not sufficiently taken into account by current development tools for websites. Even if you realize your homepage for example with a Bootstrap Webhosting Template as a Responsive Webdesign, it is not automatically barrier-free. Why is this so?
The actual size of a font depends not only on the specifications in the source code of a web page, but also on the technical boundary conditions of the output device that represents a web page. With current tools such as HTML5, you can evaluate device-specific information such as the resolution or number of pixels in the display and use it to specify a defined physical size. However, this requires not only that these values are transferred correctly by the device, but also that they can be determined uniquely. The latter is for example not the case in case of a beamer. A digital projector can indeed report the exact number of the displayed pixels, but not the resolution, as the image size and therewith the DPI depend, among others, on the distance between the lens and the projection surface. These values are therefore not specific for the device at all, but depend on the projection conditions.
Surely you can consider surfing with a beamer as a display device as an exception, but accessibility is about the exceptions. The average surfer is not dependent on the barrier-free Internet. In this context, you should also think about future security, because today's exception can be tomorrow's rule. An instructive example in this respect are web designers who, in the late 1990s, designed websites for a fixed window size, often the 1024×768 pixels of the XGA standard, and integrated corresponding specifications for screen display into the websites. As expected, the average PC screen size continued to grow, but then smartphones appeared, with screens that could display even fewer pixels than the original IBM PC some two decades earlier. Now the average size of smartphone displays is also steadily increasing, but the next cut is already on the horizon. Not only are smart watches reducing display size again, they usually no longer even offer the usual rectangular, but square or even round screen formats.
Why is accessible design important for the success of your web presence?
As already mentioned, the barrier-free Internet is about exceptions. Therefore, you can of course limit your web presence to the majority of customers whose surfing behaviour is in line with the average. However, in the constantly growing range of services on offer on the Internet, where the competition is always just a click away, this is increasingly only something that only the very big ones can afford. If, on the other hand, you are one of the majority of providers who have to make their mark with niche websites, the mathematics will put you off. The decisive keyword here is "long tail" and comes from the field of statistics. With regard to the new markets of online trade, it means in brief that here it is not the average, but the exceptional cases that make up the greater part of sales. Even Amazon makes a substantial part of its sales in the area of books with unusual titles that are hardly offered at all in conventional bookstores. A barrier-free Internet therefore also opens up a significant buyer potential for you, which you cannot achieve with a web design that is exclusively geared to the average.
