Accessibility
Does your website exclude disabled users, and other users with accessibility issues? Does your website comply with the legal requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995? Are your search engine results suffering because your website is not accessible?
The Accessibility section of the report will answer these types of questions.
So what is an Accessible website?
The web and the technologies that are around to use the web are vast, however if a website is made to be in-accessible it will block a lot of users from accessing the information. Accessibility helps many different kinds of people gain better access to your website. Very importantly it means that disabled users are not excluded (as they are from many websites!), but also it makes it easier for other groups of people to use your website. Some examples of the different types of people who would benefit follow, but remember it is not close to being a complete list.
A Blind Internet user
A blind person can be completely blind, or have very poor eyesight. A blind user may use screen reading software to view a website - its basically a web browser but the web pages are read to the user. Now, a site that is made to be accessible provides certain features and is designed in a way that will make it much easier for the blind user to navigate and read your website, and this is how the web should be. Unfortunately much of the web is not accessible to blind users - much of the time trying to use a website will just be so much hassle that the blind user has to go elsewhere in the hope of finding a more accessible site. This is an awful situation for the user.
Take the example of a person who has very poor vision. If the website does not scale in size or it uses poorly contasting colors, then this person is excluded from looking at your website information.
An eldery person
Imagine an eldely person who has severe arthritis in their hands. It is almost impossible to use a mouse and websites that rely on mouse-only operation would exclude this group of people straight away. Websites can be designed to provide keyboard access to make it easier for users who can't use a mouse.
An Apple iPhone user
And there are a lot! There are a lot of websites that just don't work well on small devices. This is an accessibilty problem too as it prevents a group of users accessing your website. There are very simple things that can be done to websites to make them work better on these small devices.
Touchscreen laptop and iPad users
As technology advances forward, it cannot be ignored. Users of these devices should be able to use websites. They have no mouse, so users cannot hover over items on a website and it is these kinds of considerations that need to be made when a website is designed.
And there's more...
These are just a very few examples of people who can experience accessibility problems with a website. Other groups of people who will also experience problems include people with learning disabilities, people with limited motor function, blind people, deaf users, people with colour blindness, eldery people and also all those people who may have limited technology available such as those with dial-up, those who don't have Javascript or Flash, and those who just need a website to work properly and are in a rush (An accessible website would often help the site work properly too).
Apart from it being a legal requirement that a business website does not exclude disabled people, by excluding people you could be excluding quite a few potential customers.