Is Your Web Site Handicap-Accessible?

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Most entrepreneurs do not even know whether their sites can be accessed and navigated successfully by blind and deaf clients, says Grant: "If you tell a small business owner that making their Web site accessible for screen readers is one more thing they have to do, they'll throw their hands up and walk away. But it's really not expensive, and it's a win-win. If you code your site correctly, and put in correct attributes for people with screen-reading programs, you get new customers."

Doing the proper coding for disability access also has another side benefit, he says. Because the screen reader coding makes the site more text-oriented, it also raises a site's search engine rankings. "Not only do you have a new customer demographic who can use your site to buy your products, but your visibility on the Internet can go up dramatically once you do this," Grant says.

Hard-to-Find Qualified Web Designers

Having a large site revamped for disability access could cost $5,000 to $15,000, Grant says, but the return on investment from search engine optimization (BusinessWeek.com, 9/10/07) should recoup that cost fairly quickly. And if you're having your site designed from the ground up, it should not be prohibitively more expensive to have the designers make it compliant with disability guidelines from the start.

The key is finding a Web designer who is familiar with Section 508 compliance, says Waddell. For business owners and Web designers who don't know how to make a site compatible with screen readers and accommodate other users with disabilities, there are many good resources available online, including at her organization's Web site and at the World Wide Web Consortium Web Accessibility Initiative. The federal procurement law is available here. In order to find out whether your company's Web site is accessible, you can run it through a free online evaluation tool.

The accessibility issue is likely to appear on the radar screens of small companies around the country in the next few years, at least in the form of customer complaints. And for small firms based in California and those that do substantial business overseas, recent court rulings mean that accessibility can no longer be ignored. "We're beginning to see that the laws overseas apply to the Internet," Waddell says, noting that a U.S. firm that grants professional certifications for project managers was sued in Britain when it failed to provide an accessible online examination.

Britain has national antidiscrimination regulations that applied in that case, she says. "There are going to be serious issues arising over geographic boundaries because the old paradigm that helped us manage where our rights and responsibilities stopped and started has gone away, and there is a lot of blurring of the lines going on with the Internet."

Waddell maintains a blog on global Internet accessibility at the Web site of the U.N.

Karen E. Klein is a business journalist who covers small-business issues for several national publications. She writes her Smart Answers column twice a week.