Starbucks Website Accessibility Policies

Web accessibility lawsuits are becoming prominent across the nation and corporations are starting to notice. Accessibility, as it applies to the internet, is allowing access to information on the web to the largest number of people and is designed to help the disabled. For company owners that have a website, this means their site must comply with particular coding and design features that provides admission to all users. Failing to abide by standards can lead to serious legal problems. Accessibility has become a growing movement. With every movement there are always companies to take the first step to advance. When it comes to the accessibility of websites, Starbucks is one of those companies. Starbucks has taken an initiative to add web accessibility suggestions and policies on their website, something every company should be doing.

While Starbucks Corporation has taken revolutionary actions to incorporate online accessibility guidelines, unfortunately, they are familiar to accessibility lawsuits. The corporation has been confronted a by a class action lawsuit concerning their physical store’s counter height. Quite possibly these lawsuits that violated the Americans with Disabilities Act are what resulted in the need to manage other parts of accessibility, inclusive of their internet website.

Starbucks currently has a website specifically linked to ways the company is making an attempt to adjust to disability guidelines. The company provides a listing of characteristics they have used to help to supply admission to disabled individuals. Starbucks claims they have decided to boost diversity, accessibility, and inclusion in everything they do. Another notable feature Starbucks has included are Braille gift cards. Starbucks has found out that accessibility is not to be taken lightly and has made the right modifications to support the culture of inclusion.

Although the infamous coffee organization has had problems regarding their physical locations, it is evident Starbucks has decided to be dedicated to web accessibility. Starbucks has done what every company ought to by including policies to support access for disabled customers. There will be no regrets for allowing access to a website, but exclusion can cause serious consequence.

Significance of Validating a Website

Validation Tools
Building and hosting your website does not simply serve the purpose. You must make sure that your website conforms to certain specifications laid down by various organizations. These specifications ensure that your website pages are interpreted in a proper manner by search engines as well as users. There are a number of validation application available online, which can be used to validate your site.

Why Validate?
Let us have a look in detail, why it’s important to validate a site when a website still looks perfect in a browser. Websites should conform to the specifications mentioned by the organizations such as W3C for the reasons mentioned below. Validation tools are developed to test if your website conforms to these rules.

Accessibility: These specifications ensure that your site is not only accessible to normal people but also to the physically disabled. In fact, this requirement is not only served as a moral in many countries but also a legal requirement. Therefore, your website should adhere to the W3C Web Accessibility Guidelines or US Section 508 standards.

Search engines: In order to have a site visited more frequently, the website should be properly indexed by search engines. These search engines automatically avoid indexing pages or part of your website if they encounter invalid pages. So it is highly essential for anyone to have their site conformed to these standards for your search engines to properly rank your site.

Visitors: Websites are built and hosted with prime objective of getting users to view it. Therefore in order to have increasingly more users visit a site, one must take care to provide relevant information without broken links.

Maintenance:  These rules can enable a site to be easily maintained and upgraded to fit to the latest trends and developments.

CMS and Tools: The content management systems and authorized tools available today enable anyone with little or no technical knowledge to develop and maintain their own websites. But most of the pages developed through this technique fail to obey the above regulations. Hence it becomes inevitably important to validate a website if you are using these techniques.

What do the tools actually do?
Validation tools are designed to test if a site conforms the aforementioned regulations. They can validate an entire websites code from a missed html tag to spelling mistakes in blogs. A site can be checked by simply entering the site’s page URL. The website can also be validated by uploading r files and directly inputting a chunk of code into a validation tool. The tool can check the HTML, CSS, XHTML, MathML, SMIL etc. of a website. Validator tools do not only validate but also suggest the steps to be taken in order to improve the performance of a website.

Web Accessibility and Skip Navigation

Overview:
An important feature when making a website accessible to disabled users is adding skip navigation.  Adding a skip to content link should be included prior to a website’s navigation tools. A single skip to content link is usually adequate for a website. Adding a skip feature allows users needing assistive screen readers to “skip” between headers and sub headers labeled H2, H3, H4.

Importance of Skip Navigation:
Providing navigation links on a website, on the left hand side or atop the page, will benefit the overall usability and give proper assistance to individuals with mobility impairments. The skip feature, for example, will be highly useful for those that have difficulty operating a mouse or using a screen reader.

Conclusion:
Yet, visually impaired individuals that utilize screen readers may hear all the links at the start of each page, this can be time consuming and cause irritation. It is imperative to add a skip navigation strategy that allows a skip over a block of navigational links for screen readers.

It’s important for every website to have a web accessibility strategy. Implementing web accessibility features improve a sites usability and give access to the widest audience possible. Skip navigation is one of the many features that

5 great reasons to focus on web accessibility in 2014

Opening the New Year brings resolutions, ambitions, a rejuvenated desire to make changes for the better. New Year’s resolutions cover a broad area ranging from creating food regimens and working out to world influencing decisions. In spite of the resolutions in store for 2014, there's certainly one area business can improve which can have a profound outcome, by setting a new year’s resolution to make the company website easily accessible. Having an easily accessible web site is going to improve the everyday life of individuals with impairments moreover it will generate more visits for to the company's internet site. Become a part of the movement to have online accessibility in 2014.

5 great reasons to focus on web accessibility in 2014:

1. Improve the Everyday Life of Impaired Individuals:
Ensuring a internet website is accessible would permit disabled individuals to have an opportunity to access identical facts, goods or services as other individuals.

2. New Consumers:
Increasing web accessibility will give the opportunity to allow impaired users to visit and navigate a website and may open companies to new clients.

3. Enhanced Usability of a Web-page:
Focusing on web accessibility will not simply help impaired clients navigate a website better, but moreover will help to facilitate the overall performance of a site.

4. Boost Search Engine Optimization and Internet browser Compatibility:
SEO, internet browser capabilities, in addition to accessibility are all attached. The adjustments utilized to further boost web accessibility also may allow website crawlers to locate an internet site more easily. The easier it is for internet crawlers to locate and navigate a website the more an organization will be visible online.

5. Maximize Earnings:
By improving a company's consumer reach as well as improving SEO, will help to acquire new customers and bring in additional sales.

Isn't it time for the web to become similarly accessible for every online client? Businesses ought to take action, support web accessibility and make a new year’s goal to have internet website that is accessible in 2014.

Learning about #A11y

Internet accessibility is developing into a subject the internet community is conversing about, and for important reasons. Possessing an internet site that permits access to new customers, even those with disabilities, is vital for increasing business, and defends from legal actions due to discrimination. The topic of web accessibility has advanced from something technical that only internet developers, national and government internet websites, or major corporations, have paid attention to. Now, it is having a large impact on the entire internet community. Articles and blog post are sent out daily on the topic and anyone can follow the conversation live on social websites using the #a11y.

The word accessibility is 13 letters long, in an internet world that typically only allows 140 characters. A11y was created to condense the length of a word. The shortened word A11y, a numeronym, is the characters ‘A’ and ‘Y’ with the number 11, representing the characters between the beginning and last letter. A11y is utilized to imply the subject of accessibility or to switch with the word when used in a sentence. Here are a couple of samples:

Use #A11y in a sentence:
Help to increase awareness of web #A11y and support the disabled community.

Place the pound symbol at the back of your post to imply the subject:
Websites must provide equal access to all users. #A11y

Gain knowledge of what A11y means, and becomes part of the discussion to support web accessibility. Website accessibility is continuing to gain importance and weight, as it affects the existence of individuals with disabilities and impacts the visibility of company owned web pages across the globe.

Join the Online Accessibility Movement

What is web accessibility?
Web accessibility pertains to an impaired internet user having the ability to utilize a service or product as effectively as someone without impairments. Most often equal navigation requires using assistive devices like; screen magnifiers, display readers, or captioning functions. For web developers and website owners this implies producing and keeping a site that follows a particular set of guidelines and specifications. These standards provide uncomplicated usability and offer compatibility with assistive technology.

Why is it crucial to aid accessibility?
Accessibility is important for numerous factors; it may help to enhance a sites functionality for every customer, strengthen SEO (Search Engine Optimization) rankings, and it supports the culture of inclusion. Expanding accessibility on the internet will enhance and better the existence of thousands of people with impairments. Increased accessibility would help to provide the same benefits of the internet to disabled users most individuals are accustomed to; from data and services, to shopping and communications.

How to aid the change?
One can help to aid changes in accessibility and support the culture of inclusion by taking the time become educated on website accessibility issues and spread the word about web accessibility. Also, if someone has an internet site, or is conscious of a site that has possible accessibility errors, let the website owner know, or use validation tools to check and fix the website. Web accessibility is becoming a concern for anyone with a web presence as they realize the potential worth of including all buyers. Become a part of the accessibility movement and help to include all users on the web.