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Home - Articles - Accessibility and eCommerce
Why Accessibility Matters
Accessibility online is exactly the same as accessibility in the real world. It means that those with poor vision, colour-blindness or just low bandwidth users can have access to all of the information that everyone else does. This idea is very much a part of the central ethos of the internet, a shared resource for everyone. The most common examples of accessibility features in websites are being able to enlarge text and the inclusion of 'alt-tags' for images so that someone will see text describing an image if they are unable to see the image itself in their browser.
Why Accessibility Matters to eCommerce
Just because it isn't a legal requirement to have accessibilty features in an eCommerce website does not mean that it isn't a very good idea to have them. The first reason that accessibility is important for eCommerce should be obvious; if there's a section of internet users who find it difficult or impossible to use your eCommerce website then you are driving away potential customers.
Accessibility REALLY Matters to Search Engine Optimization
The second reason that accessibility is a major factor in the success of an eCommerce website is that search engines are very unlikely to rank an inaccessible website highly. Search engine optimization , the process of organically improving search engine rankings , sees accessibility as a primary goal because if a search engine realises that your site is inaccessible to a portion of its users then it will drop your site's ranking in a major way and there is practically zero chance of your eCommerce website appearing on the front page of search engine results. This is largely because the 'spiders' which crawl a website to tell search engines how relevant it is to certain searches have the same outlook as a person who can only see text: if there's an image on a site without an alt-tag then it may as well not exist to the search engine spider.
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