Many accessibility guidelines are the same as SEO techniques, for example valid HTML, clear link names, using text rather than images of text, descriptive ‘title’ tags, providing text equivalents for multimedia, creating a site map, etc. This means that incorporating accessibility will at the same time help to improve websites’ search engines ranking.
As accessible websites are easier to find, access and use, they maximize the number of possible visitors. And this in turn can boost company’s profits - e-commerce websites can increase sales and non-profit organizations get more funding.
Accessibility can help to decrease costs, such as maintenance costs, server costs, cost of upgrading to new technologies, cost of customer support services (as more people are able to complete many of the tasks online), etc..
In general, accessibility increases usability of a website, and in effect improves quality of user experience. Some accessibility guidelines are similar to the usability ones, such as promoting clear and consistent design and navigation, dividing blocks of information into logical sections, good color contrast, etc. Increased usability makes users more likely to return to the website, use it more thoroughly and recommend it to others.
Although incorporating accessibility can increase site development time initially, in long term it reduces time spent on site improvements and maintenance. Using style sheets and coding to standards reduces effort needed to change presentation across a site.
