III. Why Implementing it?
3.3. Benefits for the Company
For the company, an accessible website will certainly need a bigger amount of work for its conception, design and implementation. However, it is also a website that will be easier to maintain, to modify, or to develop. The cost for the development of a website may be more important if its accessibility must be taken into account, but the maintaining cost will generally be lower. Moreover, a website developed following web standards – i.e. where the content of the website, generally represented by its HTML code, and its presentation, using CSS are dissociated (See section 6.3. Page Structure) – will save bandwidth to the company; indeed, ten pages where both the content code and the presentation code are present will necessitate more bandwidth than ten pages containing the content code only and utilising one single same style sheet file that web browsers will be able to put in their cache.
An accessible website will also retain more visitors, and potential customers; and thus represent a potential addition to the turnover of the company (See Accessibility is Expensive and Time Consuming above).
Finally, even though it is difficult to evaluate, a more accessible website may be better referenced by search engine’s robots, which gets the same information as a blind person would from a website.