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Broadband Availability
Getting broadband
Getting broadband service is easy with a little research
Broadband Internet services are much more common today, in contrast with the dial-up days of the late 1990s. The fact is that greater amounts of information need to...
Cable or DSL Broadband?
I've been asked this question so many times I thought I'd put my
thoughts down here for you to read. Let's start by pointing out
a couple things first. First off, depending on where you live,
you may not have a choice of access. Satellite may be...
Don't worry about Scrooge this Christmas, by shopping online you'll save plenty of time and money
According to a study by BizRate Research, 60% of women were
already planning their online buying in September, compared to
only 42% of men. Women are also reported to carry the burden of
Christmas shopping with 55% taking on the...
Find the best downloads online
Oh, we all know that we can download a load of free stuff from the Internet easily. But the best downloads are the ones that DON'T come with 'extra' features like viruses, worms, adwares, spywares, whathaveyounots. It's the truth. When you download...
Finding the Right DS3 Bandwidth Provider
Telecommunications contracts can be much like a marriage and as we all know there are good and bad marriages. The fact is, when you enter into a telecommunications contract with a DS3 Bandwidth provider for reasonable amount of bandwidth or voice...
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Benefits of making your website accessible to disabled users – part 1: increase in reach
The Disability Discrimination Act states that service providers must not discriminate against disabled people. A website is regarded as a service and therefore falls under this law.
Some organisations are changing their websites, but many are seemingly not making the adjustments. Disabled people don’t access their website, they say, so why should they care?
The statistics on the number of users who may face difficulties in using your website are however quite startling:
•There are 8.6 million registered disabled people in the UK (14% of the population) (http://www.drc-gb.org/whatwedo/aboutus.asp)
•One in 12 men and one in 200 women have some form of colour blindness (nine percent of the UK population) (http://www.iee.org/Policy/Areas/Health/cvdintro.cfm)
•Two million UK residents have a sight problem (four percent of the population) (http://www.rnib.org.uk/xpedio/groups/public/documents/publicwebsite/public_rnib003680.hcsp#P16_1214)
•There are 12 million people aged 60 or over (21% of the UK population) (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/census2001/pyramids/pages/UK.asp). At this age most people begin to experience a decrease in vision, hearing and physical and cognitive ability.
Although there is inevitably some overlap between all of the aforementioned groups, adding up these numbers provides a total of 48% of the UK population that could potentially face problems using your website. It is an extraordinarily high number.
Non-disabled people may also experience difficulties using your website. Not everyone is viewing your website on the latest version of Internet Explorer, with all the plug-ins and programs that you may require them to have for optimal access. If your website relies on images, Flash or JavaScript, and fails to provide alternatives, then a
number of web users will be unable to access your website. The following examples are a common occurrence:
•Users on slow connections regularly turn images off to enable a quicker download time. Some browsers, such as the text-only Lynx browser do not display images at all.
•Not every user has downloaded the latest Flash program that is needed to display your site. Additionally, the download time on Flash websites often takes so long that users lose patience and don't even wait to see the content. Just 17% of web users in the UK are connected to the Internet via broadband (www.liquidzope.com/abc/2/4currentusage/currentstatebbd/view).
•JavaScript is a scripting language that can cause changes to a page, often through mouse functions, buttons, or other actions from the user. For example, pop-ups are opened using JavaScript. JavaScript is unsupported by approximately four percent of web users (http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2004/February/javas.php), either because they have turned it off to prevent pop-up adverts or because their browser does not support it.
•WebTV, mobile phones, and PDAs have limited support for large images, Flash and JavaScript. You can test your website on WebTV by downloading the free viewer at http://developer.msntv.com/TOOLS/webtvvwr.asp. You can also look at how your website will look on a mobile phone with the Wapalizer, a free program available at http://www.gelon.net.
About the Author
This article was written by Trenton Moss of Webcredible (http://www.webcredible.co.uk), the user-friendly website experts. Find articles and tutorials about web usability, web accessibility, web credibility, search engine optimisation and CSS in the extensive web development resources (http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/) area of their website.
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