WHAT IS ACCESSIBILITY  ?

Accessibility is about making your website accessible to people with disabilities and is a legal requirement under the Disability Discrimination Act (for full details of the Act go to www.web-access.org.uk). More than one in seven of the U.K. population (about 8.5 Million) have some form of disability which can inhibit their use of your web site if their needs are not taken into consideration in the design process. That's a lot of potential viewers!
Disabled people represent a market for goods and services estimated at £33b each year. (RADAR web site - consultancy services). However the Disabled Rights Commission (DRC) claim that this figure is actually £40b.

Disabled people are more likely to use the internet for research, entertainment and the purchase of goods and services than any other distinct group in society.

INCLUSION

There are a variety of disabilities which may effect how a person is able to use the internet and which technologies they employ when surfing the net. For example not everyone is going to be able to use a mouse to navigate your website and two million people in the UK have a sight problem (Source: Royal National Institute of the Blind). 8-10% of the male population has some sort of colour-blindness – for some reason it is more prevalent in men. The watch word has to be inclusion - making your web site accessible to all!

MAKING YOUR WEBSITE ACCESSIBLE
First off it doesn't mean compromising on design, however it is disturbing to discover how many web designers & developers think that all is required is image alt tags and a text only version. These are useful but are only part of the story. It's simple things like allowing the user to resize the text (from the View menu in Internet Explorer) rather than having a fixed size and being aware of the requirements of the technology that a disabled person may be using. For example someone with a visual impairment may be using screen reading software which reads what it sees on the screen from left to right. When you have 2 columns of text like this:

A screen reader would read this as : Mary had a little lamb, and everywhere that Mary went, It's fleece was white as snow The lamb was sure to go. Confusing Huh!
If they can't see the screen they can't use a mouse to navigate around your site and are stuck on your opening page. With the addition of accesskey code they will be able to use the keyboard to get around your web site. The main menu on the left of these pages has access key codes which screen reading software will identify for the user. If you press Alt and the access key then Enter you will be taken to the appropriate page. If you would like to try it out the access keys are : HOME = 1 , INFO = 2 , SERVICES = 3 , SUPPORT = 4 , CLIENTS = 5 , PROJECTS = 6 , ACCESSIBILITY = 7 , CONTACT = 8.
These are just a few examples - there's more going on behind the scenes that you don't see.