Virtually every company today has a Web site. Such a site can introduce you to potential clients, help you promote your services, reinforce your expertise and provide helpful information.

Not everyone who visits cyberspace, however, can decipher what is on the screen, nor can everyone navigate through pages. For individuals with disabilities, the benefits of a Web site depend on what has been done to make it accessible.

There are a number of ways to make your Web site accessible to the disabled, and it doesn’t necessarily require a lot of time or money.

Halifax-based Citadel Securities, currently going through the registration process with the Investment Dealers Association of Canada, is building its inaugural Web site, and accessibility features are being built into the site, says Beste Alpargun, Citadel’s vice president of research and CFO.

Among the features the Web designer is including are screen-reader compatibility, text-sizing options and audio clips with volume adjustments for individuals who have visual or hearing impairments. Still, there will be areas that are problematic, Alpargun notes. Web pages in portable document format, for example, are not compatible with screen-reader software, which converts words into an audio track. But many companies prefer PDFs because it is difficult to alter them and most computer systems can open them without any fuss.

“In time, this technology may change,” Alpargun says.

In the meantime, financial advisors continue to enhance their Web sites as much as possible. There are myriad reasons why making a site accessible is simply good business, says Georgia Whalen, director of information technology and standards at the Canadian Council on Rehabilitation and Work, a national organization that promotes and supports the equitable employment of persons with disabilities.

An accessible Web site, she points out, “can increase revenue, awareness and clients.”

“You do what target audiences want you to do,” says Alpargun. “But it’s also a mission to make your Web site accessible to everyone.”

In time, it may also be a legal requirement. Whalen notes that a code of practice in Britain says Web sites must be accessible to the disabled.

A class-action lawsuit is currently being played out in the U.S. in National Federation of the Blind v. Target Corp. The NFB is suing U.S. retailer Target because visually impaired individuals cannot access much of the information on the company’s Web site or make independent purchases.

The first round in the dispute has gone to the NFB. A Federal District Court judge in northern California found that the Americans with Disabilities Act, which prohibits discrimination in the enjoyment of goods, services, facilities or privileges, applies virtually as well as concretely. The court rejected the retail giant’s argument that only its physical store locations were covered by the act, ruling instead that all services provided by Target, including its Web site, must be accessible to persons with disabilities.

There is no doubt that it is easier to build an accessible Web site from the ground up. “Web site incompatibilities may arise if a site was not designed with accessibility in mind,” says Nathan Klassen, network and office administrator with the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Nova Scotia.

Still, he says, there are a number of relatively easy ways to enhance an existing Web site. These include providing an option to change text size within a site (to small, medium or large text); providing “bread crumb” trails to help people with cognitive problems find their way; offering media in a variety of formats (for example, transcripts offered with audio clips and audio clips provided with text); and entering descriptive text when posting an image (when the cursor hovers over an image, a text-based description appears that can be read with voice-recognition software).

Comprehensive specifications for Web site accessibility have been developed by the World Wide Web Consortium to assist in making sites more user-friendly for individuals with visual disabilities such as blindness or colour blindness, hearing impairments, physical disabilities, motor disabilities, speech disabilities, cognitive and neurological disabilities, dyslexia and dyscalculia, attention deficit disorder, intellectual disabilities, memory impairments and mental health disabilities — among others.

Whalen also recommends consulting Web-accessibility experts before moving ahead with changes to your Web site. IE