Accessibility… The Basics. – Web
Accessibility... The Basics.
Alan Cole
An accessible website is one that allows as many people as possible to access the infomation contained within it. An inportant subset of accessibility is allowing people with visual, aural, or physical disabilities full access to the information and services available in the same way as able-bodied people. Ensuring that your website is not dependant on particular hardware or software is also an important consideration when building accessible websites.
Is it worth it
At least 10% of the population in most countries has disabilities; visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, and neurological disabilities can all affect access to the Web.
Average age of population in many countries is increasing; aging sometimes results in combinations of accessibility issues; vision & hearing changes, changes in dexterity & memory.
Many elderly and disabled people rely increasingly on the internet to obtain their goods and services.
Few organizations can afford to deliberately miss this market sector. On top of this, accessible web design contributes to advantages for able-bodies users too. Accessible websites:
Allow access to users of mobile phones, small display scress, Web-TV and web-kiosks and other new web=enabled devices.
Increases usability in low bandwidth or slow connection situations.
Provide access across a wider range of computer hardware and software.
Other extremely important benefits that make accessible websites worthwhile are that:
Many governments now require certain websites to conform to accessibility guidellines.
Accessible websites are easier to index by search engines and therefore help drive traffic to your site.
What does it entail
Many techniques involved in making your website accessible will have no effect whatsoever on the final look and feel of your site for the majority of users. It will however allow users with disabilities to use assitive devices such as screen readers to read text out aloud to them and assistive input devices for people with physical disabilities to access and use your site. Some of the key concepts are:
To provide textual alternatives for all images and animations
To ensure that textual content can be resized to the users peronsal preference
To ensure sufficient contrast between text colour and background colour
To ensure that hyperlinks contain text that describes their purpose.
To ensure that hyperlinks are large enough to make them easy to select
To use a consistent and easy to navigate layout
Other benefits
The robots that search engines use to catalogue your website are essentially blind visitors to your site. Accessible websites are therefore more search engine friendly and result in better search engine rankings and ultimately more visitors to your site. Other advantages include:
Better structure means easier and cheaper site maintenance
Accessible sites demonstrate that your organiation takes its social responsibilty seriously
Increased support for internationalisation
Reduces hosting costs
I believe accessibility is beneficial for all involved and should be a consideration of every website.
About The Author
Alan Cole runs www.pixelwave.co.uk, a one-person web design studio. His aim is to provide cost effective website design production and maintenance by offering professional web solutions that stand out from the crowd.
http://www.pixelwave.co.uk
justal@lineone.net
Manchester United: Top of the web accessibility league – Web
Manchester United: Top of the web accessibility league
Trenton Moss
A while ago Manchester United launched a separate accessible version of their website, manutd.com/access. Theres been lots of publicity surrounding this accessible website and it even picked up an award. This accessible version doesnt offer as much content as the main website but it has all the accessibility features you could dream of: resizable text, ALT tags, screen reader optimisation etc.
Wow! Everyone should make a separate accessible website for disabled people, right Wrong.
Buffet - no ones happy
Last week I went to an all-you-can eat buffet. The tables were on the ground floor but the buffet was situated on the first floor, up a flight of steep stairs. In order to serve their disabled customers, the restaurant had decided to offer an alternative version of the buffet, with most of the main dishes, on the ground floor.
The non-disabled customers werent happy that they had to walk up and down those stairs just to get some food; the disabled guests werent happy at not being able to eat any pickles they werent deemed popular enough to be placed on the ground floor buffet; and the waiters were unhappy that they had to work so much harder to maintain two separate buffets. Plus, theyre being told by their manager that the ground floor buffet should eventually offer all the same food as the upstairs regular buffet, which means even more work for them!
What a ridiculous situation! If only the restaurant had set up a travelator to get to the buffet then the non-disabled guests wouldnt be unhappy about climbing those stairs, disabled guests wouldnt feel marginalised and the waiters wouldnt have to do the same job twice. And from what I hear travelators are quite cheap and easy to install nowadays.
Manutd.com - no ones happy
Actually, I never went to this restaurant; in fact, it doesnt even exist, except as a metaphor for the Manchester United website. The buffet on the first floor is their main website, a pain for non-disabled users due to its high inaccessibility: Menus rely on JavaScript not supported by 5% of Internet users; ALT tags are missing from images just one in four UK Internet users are on broadband - users on slow connections may turn off images to speed up download time; and usability is incredibly poor.
In the upstairs buffet part of the Man Utd website there are over 100 choices in the navigation menu. The downstairs buffet, manutd.com/access, has eight. Thats a lot of pickles being withheld.
Then there are the waiters/web developers, having to manage two buffets/websites, and ultimately theyre expected to provide the same amount of food/information to both.
Man Utd have got it all wrong
What Manchester United has done goes against the whole concept of web accessibility. The positive press coverage theyre getting for their separate accessible website is actually damaging to the promotion of web accessibility as a whole - if companies think they have to go to these extremes to make their website accessible then it will surely discourage them to do so. To top it all off, manutd.com/access, although Im sure is fully accessible to disabled and blind people, doesnt even pass the W3C Priority 2 accessibility checkpoints!
So come on, Manchester United, ditch this
Web Accessibility Myths – Web
Web Accessibility Myths
Trenton Moss
With more and more countries around the world passing laws about blind and disabled access to the Internet including the Disability Discrimination Act in the UK, web accessibility has been thrown into the spotlight of the online community. This article attempt to put a stop to the misinformation that has been thrown around and tell you the truth behind web accessibility.
1. Creating a text-only equivalent is sufficient
Webcredible Handbook
Creating a separate text-only equivalent can lead to a number of problems:
A text-only version is not necessarily accessible
Two versions of the same website represents a huge time and money investment for you
Your primary site may not be accessible to many users
An extra accessible website for blind and disabled users can be one more way to make them feel marginalised from mainstream society
Web accessibility isnt just about blind and disabled Internet users being able to use your site - its about everyone being able to access it successfully. It really doesnt have to take very much time or money to make your website accessible.
2. Its complicated and expensive to make my website accessible
To develop an accessible website from scratch will cost virtually the same as to develop a website that isnt accessible. A very large, highly inaccessible website may take a bit more time and money to fix up, although the basic layout and design usually need not change.
Web accessibility is not complicated and anyone with basic web design skills can easily implement it.
3. Accessible and attractive web design cant go together
Many advocates of web accessibility tend to have rather dull, unattractive websites. This is unfortunate, as web accessibility need not affect the design of the website in any way whatsoever. To fully dispel this myth, have a look at the CSS Zen Garden http://www.csszengarden.com - a beautiful website offering 100% accessibility.
4. Accessible websites stifle creativity
Web accessibility actually places very few restrictions on website design. In fact, as with regular websites, youre only really limited by your imagination when creating accessible websites. Have a look at the CSS Zen Garden http://www.csszengarden.com to see for yourself that accessibility doesnt have to affect creativity in any way.
5. My site visitors dont have a problem accessing my website
Not necessarily. See Benefits of an accessible website - part 1 http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/web-accessibility/benefits-of-accessible-websites-1.shtml to see just how many Internet users you may be excluding from your site. You can be sure that with 35 million websites to choose from its unlikely that a site visitor prevented from accessing your website is going to waste his time contacting you to ask you to fix the problem.
6. Web accessibility places restrictions on the web page design
Not at all. As with regular websites, youre only limited by your imagination when creating accessible websites. Text size can be as large or as small you like provided its resizable, you can use any colour scheme you like provided colour isnt the only way you differentiate information and you can use as many images as you like provided an alternative description is provided.
These accessibility provisos mostly happen behind the scenes and dont affect the presentation of the website.
7. Blind and disabled people dont use the Internet
On the contrary, blind and disabled people benefit from the Internet perhaps more than anyone else.
For example, visually impaired people have to phone up a supermarket when they want to go shopping to inform them of their arrival. When they get there, a store assistant will accompany them around the store. Through accessible websites blind people can now shop at home, and in their own time.
Conclusion
Web accessibility isnt brain science. Its not just about disabled users being able to access your website - its about everyone being able to access your website, including people using handheld devices, WebTV and in-car browsers. Any web developer with basic HTML and CSS design knowledge, and a bit of time on their hands, can easily learn and implement web accessibility.
About The Author
Trenton Moss is crazy about web accessibility and usability - so crazy that he went and started his own web accessibility and usability consultancy Webcredible - http://www.webcredible.co.uk to help make the Internet a better place for everyone.