Accessibility it means that something can be used, obtained, approached, entered or reached. Two meanings applicable to the Internet can be derived from this. Firstly, the provision of Internet access to people with disabilities or the elderly as free as possible from barriers and, secondly, the accessibility and readability of a website for a crawler.
Accessibility in terms of the absence of barriers
Today, the Internet is generally viewed as a free space designed to be accessible to large numbers of people. Accessibility plays an important role in this context. As part of the W3C, the Web Accessibility Proposal (WAI) upholds the idea that the Web should be usable by as many viable people as possible. The WAI has been striving to achieve this since 1997. To facilitate access by users with physical restrictions to data on the Internet, the WAI has developed various guidelines since 1999:
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG): These include information on web programming standards and also cover content, technology, and design.
- Author's Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG): For this case, special conditions apply to the tools used to create web pages.
- Accessibility Guidelines for User Agents (UAAG): These guidelines define the conditions that browsers or media players must meet.
- Web Accessibility Proposal, Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA): This policy is intended to ensure that, through metadata and special functions, blind people can also use widgets and web apps.
The W3C has released a list of for webmasters.
Accessibility and SEO
Accessibility is also an important concept for SEOs, since it is related to the creation of websites in such a way that the content and technical structure can be easily accessed by search engine spiders. Hence, it can be concluded that perfect accessibility is the result of perfect optimization of a page.
The following are important factors in providing maximum accessibility and readability for a website crawler:
- Clean font.
- A clear structure of the site as with the header tags.
- A clear structure of the content, for example, with paragraphs, bold or italic.
- The provision of relevant content in text and image or moving images.
- There is no content hidden by JavaScript.
- No complicated flash animations.
- There are no broken links.
- The sensible use of meta-information such as title or description to clearly identify the content[1].
Optimization limits
Especially for SEOs, the temptation is great to over-optimize a website. Keyword accumulation (padding) is a significant factor. Therefore, before engaging in any accessibility optimization, any SEO should ask whether these improvements will ultimately create additional benefits for users.
