Why be concerned with accessibilty?

Webpage accessibility should concern journalists because journalists have an obligation to provide people with information through which they can actively practice democracy. The W3C Web accessibility pages say that “everyone should be able to perceive, understand, navigate and interact with the web.” The importance of the internet for the practice of democratic rights is constantly increasing. Equal access to the web leads to equal opportunity, because “the web is an increasingly important resource in many aspects of life: education, employment, government, commerce, health, recreation ….”. Problems which face accessibility in Africa tend to be poverty-related, particularly the lack of computer literacy, and inadequate infrastructure for internet access. Many poorer South Africans do not know how to navigate a website in order to find the information they need, therefore that information is inaccessible to them. Lack of bandwidth and unequal access to technology act as physical barriers to the access of information necessary for the practice of democracy. If we as journalists want to avoid exacerbating the digital divide, we must find ways to make our websites more accessible. This would entail using more efficient forms of coding (such as XHTML), and thinking critically about the structure and navigation of web pages.