With 8.6 Million people registered as disabled in the UK, spending an estimated £60 Billion every year, there is a clear commercial incentive to ensure accessibility. This consideration is backed up further by the moral and legal responsibilities that website owners have.

As SEO specialists Rating Room have another reason why accessibility is a good investment for most websites:

Google, Yahoo and MSN all find information about websites using software that, if described as a human, would be blind.

Search engine spiders have to read the information on a web page in a similar way to how screen readers would dictate a page to a blind person. If the site design causes errors or confusing results for a blind person then search engine spiders are likely to have a problem too.

A site that can be understood fully by the search engines will benefit from increased reach, greater exposure and more visitors. Couple this with the improvement in usability, conversion rates and satisfaction for all visitors means you are bound to gain a much better ROI from an accessible website.