A requirement that sometimes comes up at the beginning of a new project is that we should supply a text-only version of a website, often purportedly for improved accessibility. I thought I’d write a quick post to outline my thoughts on why this is a bad idea, and why we encourage our clients that it’s something best avoided.

An Innaproprtiate Solution to an Irrelevant Problem

Text-only companion sites were de riguer in the 1990s, when the web was a very different beast. The vast majority of us were accessing the net on 56k modems, and most sites were built using HTML tables and/or Adobe’s nascent Flash platform. Then Google started its inexorable rise to ubiquity and publishers (or webmasters, remember them?) started to realize that content was king: quality content was the best way to get to the top of the search results and thus attract more visitors.

Having the main content of your site hidden away in the depths of nested HTML tables wasn’t great, as the signal-to-noise ratio of content to markup was pretty high, so Google ranked pages lower than it ideally should. Having the content of your site hidden away in Flash was awful – your site was effectively invisible to Google and so fell below the radar. A popular solution was to provide a text-only companion site. Easily indexable, it provided focused content and meant for better Search Engine rankings. A much-touted side effect was that the text-only version would be more accessible to users on older browsers, or those with disabilities.

Things have moved on from 10-20 years ago. Skilled web professionals have been using CSS and XHTML to provide accessible sites with a clear separation of content from styling for at least 10 years, which renders text-only sites for SEO utterly pointless. The increase in processing power and adoption of modern browsers has started to make javascript and HTML5 into viable standards-based alternatives to Flash (and Apple’s much-publicised refusal to support the platform on its mobile devices will surely be Flash’s death knell), so again, there’s precious little value in providing a text-only alternative to a Flash site when you could make just the one standards-based site instead.

Accessibility

So that just leaves the accessibility argument. I’m not buying into it. I can’t understand how a text-only site is more readable to a visually-impaired user using screenreader software. On a standards-based website it simply isn’t – the screenreader can understand XHTML and will happily ignore the structural markup. For a visually-impaired user who is still physically looking at your site, tools are avialable within the browser to make text more legible.

Other drawbacks

There’s more reasons to consider, not least of all the problem of maintainability. By keeping a text-only companion site you’re essentially creating the need to administer two sites in tandem. An immediate workaround that springs to mind is to simply automatically strip all the styling from your html site and save it in parallel, but this is fraught with complications, for example copy referring to images or links stating “click here”.

Finally there’s the SEO disadvantages. Google’s algorithms have become much more complex over the years and one technique that it uses now is to determine whether sites are trying to “game” it. It’s very likely that Google will interpret the copious duplication of content on your site as an attempt to score more highly in search results. If it does do this it will penalise your ranking, or even drop you from its index.

I’d love to hear what others think about text-only sites in the comments.