By: onlinetools.org
Why accessibility? What does it mean?
Making web sites accessible means opening them for a wider audience than people with vision and the ability to use the internet with a mouse and a keyboard. This is a natural process in every media, books became printed in large print and braille, TV became captioned. As of start of this year in the US and in the UK it is necessary by law for certain web sites to be accessible.
Accessibility does not mean the end of web design and web development as we know it. It simply means the end of immature use of a new technology. When the web was new, everything that was different was a great success. Rollovers, status bar scrollers, dragable or moving elements, zooming and animation were used widely and, almost most of the time, unnecessarily. These gimmicks are cool, when you see them for the first time, but they don´t add any extra value to the web site. They are products of the design playground, touching the edge of what is possible. These times are over, we should grow up as designers and developers and think "What does make sense" rather than "What can be done"
Building accessible software or web sites generally means one thing: Making allowances for characteristics a person cannot readily change.
- If I am blind, I cannot become sighted just because your web site looks great and relies on graphical elements for navigation.
- If I am colour blind I might not be able to use the navigation, because it uses two colours that look the same to me for text and background.
- If I have bad eyesight I cannot focus on small buttons and miniscule pixel fonts to navigate around the page.
- If I am physically unable to use a mouse to navigate through a DHTML dropdown navigation, I cannot do so just to justfy the idea that those save time.
All these above problems have to be tackled by an accessible web site. That is the bad news. The good news is, that not much changes for designers.
Continue reading "Designing for accessibility"
