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Why is accessibility important? There are so many web users in this day and age that developers often design for greatest impact, designing and building web pages for thier specific market area. While this is all well and good, it can frequently lead to the overlooking of one large group of users whose needs are just as great if not greater than the general population. This group of people are those with special needs or disabilities, and the size of this user group is nothing to bat an eye at. In 2005 www.practicalecommerce.com reported that 18.7% of web users in the United States alone were disabled in some way. What kinds of disabilites might make it hard to navigate the web, you ask? Just having a lower field of vision, as people often develop later in life can make it extremely hard, if not impossible to read anything on the web if the user is unable to scale up text. Firefox and Safari have a page zoom fuction which are helpful, but don't even get me started on IE. If your designer didn't use percentages, or EMS for size declaration, then forget it. And this is just one miniscule category, in a vast sea of disabilites, some only slight impairments and some tragically altering. Another very important issue for web users with impairments is the ability to benefit from eCommerce. For some of these users, it may be quite hard to actually leave their place of residence to make a simple purchase. For these users especially, accessibility is of utmost importance and must be fully intact for continued business with said users. With that said, having an accessible website will not only insure that your users with impairments have thier needs met, having had a positive user experience, they will keep coming back. This means: more users, bigger web buzz, higher ranking, greater web presence and most of all, happy customers. And remember, happy customers = repeat customers.