Accessibility search

[themegroup]

Hello there,

One of the sites we do work for is a chain of care homes. We are in the process of adding a page reader so any visitors they have who are visually impaired will find it easier to access the info they need.

We're doing this from a usability point of view more than anything (given their target audience), but while looking to see if there were any accessibility news sites /directories we could leverage for some links I came across mentions of the old Google Accessibility search. It seems to have been before my time as an SEO, so I wondered:

• is this still relevant, or has it just been assimilated into the regular algorithm (the only mentions I could find were very dated)

• if relevant and separate from the main search, are there many who use it

• what other things should we take into account when trying to optimise for this (assuming it's still relevant, of course)

Cheers guys!

[AlanMosley]

No really SEO related, but a good read anyhow

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg701983(v=VS.85).aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms753388.aspx

[themegroup]

Thanks for that, looks very thorough. I should probably have pointed out that all our sites are DDA compliant anyway, but given this company runs care homes it seems more important - especially if it gives us a rankings edge over the competition.

[RyanKent]

A few links that may help:

The W3C's Accessibility Initiative website: http://www.w3.org/WAI/

A tool for checking the accessibility of a web page: http://wave.webaim.org/

The company SEOmoz uses for accessibility certification: http://www.rampweb.com/

[themegroup]

Thanks for those links Ryan. the W3C is what we us for checking DDA compliance, but I guess it's good to have other sources as a sanity check. My question, however, largely relates to the Google Accessibility search and the SEO benefits of ensuring we're compliant? As I said, I could only find old posts on the subject so I didn't know if it had gone the way of other Google initiatives from days gone by?

[RyanKent]

I am not aware of any part of Google's algorithm which compares two websites and says "site A is accessible and site B is not, so give site A a boost".

The relevant points I can share are many accessibility features tie into SEO:

• ALT tags for images are considered an accessibility feature, and they also add strong SEO benefits.

• Receiving an accessibility certification can offer numerous benefits. You may be listed in the company's directory which would offer your site positive exposure and a link. You can offer a press release announcing your site is now compliant. You can display a trust badge which always looks good and helps visitors trust your site more. You would clearly be used more frequently by visitors who depend on websites being compliant so your stats such as time on site, bounce rate, etc would improve slightly.

• An accessibility inspection of your website will often reveal issues which impact SEO. Invisible or hidden objects, empty links, etc.

[themegroup]

Cheers Ryan,

That's kind of what I suspected - most of the best practice things that also affect SEO in some way (alt tags etc) we're already doing, and we were going to put together a press release highlighting the extra accessibility lengths we've gone to that will hopefully get a bit of attention. So as long as I'm not missing anything, that's cool!