The Physically Challenged Users Too Are A Powerful Market

Don't Neglect Them While Designing Your Site

Disabled users are one part of the web surfing population that is increasing in numbers rapidly with the improvement in and affordability of the assistive technology. And if you have been neglecting or ignoring this section of the web population, then you are missing out on making huge profits from these buyers. Assistive technology, like screen readers, Braille displays, user-defined style sheets,and magnification is used successfully to help the visually impaired and blind users to navigate the web.

It is important for you as a webmaster and as a businessperson to understand that it's not only the normal and physically fit people who need to buy things online. The physically impaired or challenged people too depend, infact to a great extent, on the net to buy stuff sitting at home so that they have the freedom to get things on their own, without needing any body else's help. They are confident and capable of using the net like regular users to read newspapers, blogs, articles, forums, and research. They can shop from home without undergoing the ordeal of physically visiting the stores to buy.

But there are many webmasters and companies that do not understand the importance of these special people and indulge in such black hat seo practices that hamper and retard the user experience of the physically challenged people. One such trick employed by the wrong intentioned and senseless webmasters is the stuffing of keywords in order to improve rankings. This exposes the physically challenged users to these long and tedious strings of meaningless keywords that have no context, or sense.

These dirty techniques are seen as soon as the screen reader loads a page and title attribute is read by the user. Not only this,web browsers also display the so called "hidden" text (like white text on white background, stuffed div tags,etc). As a result of this, the visually impaired users are forced to see the unneccessary stuffed keywords as against the normal page display in a typical web browser. To aggravate their frustration further, the visually impaired users are left with no alternative but to tackle the poorly designed pages by listing all links on a page from which they can find alternatives for the information required by them. But the problem arises as these lists of listings themselves may be consisting of optimized pages that are full of stuffed keywords.

True web optimization doesn't segregate or isolate users on the basis of ability or disability. From online marketing point of view also, by creating websites meant for only the normal people, you are losing on to a very potential and profit generating segmant of clients,i.e, the physically challenged or impaired users.

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