The Accessibility Buzzword

02/05/2006

Here's an experiment. Unplug your mouse and monitor, and try to use your computer.

Even browsing the internet becomes next to impossible. Yet for many people who have sight problems or other physical disabilities, this is what they are faced with every day.

Our society is increasingly based around information, and the internet is by far our biggest tool for accessing that information. Many of us complete our education, get jobs, work, shop and play online, by filling in forms, typing our names and passwords, clicking buttons with the mouse and using keyboard shortcuts when we know them.

Making your website "Accessible" has come to mean "Making it easy for disabled people to access and navigate." Without sight, or perhaps paralyzed and unable to use a standard mouse or keyboard, many people use special software or hardware to help them move around the internet. An accessible site presents its design and content in such as way as to make it quick and easy for these special devices to navigate and present to the people using them.

In the US, federal law in the form of Section 508 makes it a requirement that certain government and legal websites follow accessibility standards. These requirements are the internet equivalent of laws that govern how physical buildings must have disabled access. Just like a brick-and-mortar public building needs wheelchair ramps, a website needs to give access to disabled as well.

So accessibility is a big issue. If you want to get the most out of your site, make it accessible.

How is this accomplished?

Making a website "accessible" means making it easier for disabled people to access and understand. But how do we actually do this?

First of all, we have to understand how disabled people browse the internet.

It is common practice for the sight-impaired to use what's known as "screen-reading" software, which will read out the content of a page through the computer's speakers or a set of earphones. A method used by people with limited mobility involves a very limited set of keys being pressed to move around a page - so no mouse pointer is available.

I'll cover some practical steps about how to set up your site from a technical point of view in a future article. For the moment, there are a couple of simple steps to remember:

• All your images should have "Alternative Text" attached to them, so that if someone is using a screen reader they will be provided with a description of the image.
• Make sure your text can be resized using the in-browser text display commands. Many people can't read standard text sizes even if they are not strictly classified as disabled.
• If there are form elements to fill out or buttons to press they should have keyboard shortcuts associated with them so that people without a mouse can still use them effectively.
• The order of the information on a page should be carefully considered. Make it easy for screen reader users to skip straight to the important content, rather than have to listen to your menu and header text on every page.

Many of these general rules to accessibility also make good design sense anyway, and should help make your site clear and organised.

 

External links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_screen_readers - Wikipedia list of screen reader software, includes free downloadable screen readers.

http://www.section508.gov/ - US Section 508 website