According to the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA), service providers must not discriminate against disabled people. A website is regarded as a service and as such must be made accessible to everyone. In an article called Benefits of an Accessible Website, Web usability and accessibility consultant Trenton Moss who runs the site www.webcredible.co.uk claims that businesses should start taking these issues seriously because by making their websites more accessible to web users, they are also making them more accessible to search engines.
Search engines cannot usually understand images, JavaScript, Flash, audio and video content. According to Moss, by providing alternative content to each of these, all areas of a website will be accessible to search engines, which will have a better understanding of its purpose. And the more confident a search engine is of the purpose of a given website, the higher it will place this site in the search rankings.
