Blazing away on Twitter is some back-and-forth fun about the contribution of usability on SEO and search engine results (Google, in this case).
I believe Google should introduce some responsibility to it’s results pages so that there are some relative weights given to valid and compliant code (W3C).
Enhancing a site for W3C compliance could potentially bring more users who require accessible websites. I’ve tried to do some research on the law of accessibility but didn’t draw too many good/useful results for this article’s purpose. I did see the US Usability blog which isn’t a terrible read at all but no real info on where governments stand on creating usable and accessible content. There is no doubt that people with disabilities can benefit more from better coding. If we can all try to stick to standards then engineers can develop better methods of delivering the information. That to me, is a good enough reason to deliver standard code.
The accessibility idea is a spin off from standards. Think of coding standards from a logical point of view. You want your website to go the distance, right? Bad code isn’t going to do that for you. To put it frankly, deprecation is a mother f*cker… The chances of compliant features and code becoming deprecated in the near future are not very likely.
So if not for the future of your web content, how about for people who have disabilities? Either way, ignoring compliancy will eventually decrease traffic either from missing a segment of human users (Accessibility) or from losing traffic from service adoption due to deprecation.