Re: FN-FORUM: Making accessible websites

date posted 18th February 2004 22:50

thanks for the thoughts Karl. I've been thinking on about this and
realizing that it is to the core of the site that accessibility needs
to reach, as opposed to just making sure some extra tags are in place
on my design... i.e. it's the navigation and content that need to be
interesting and solid in their construction, so that someone using a
text reader still has some kind of enjoyable / useful experience from
the site...

yet, the site will also be viewed by able bodied people who are either
volunteering or donating to the charity, so they need to see something
that evokes the right image to them...

this is a challenge for sure!

luke


On 18 Feb 2004, at 23:25, Karl Bunyan wrote:

> Luke,
>
> To be honest, I don't think the coding part of accessibility isn't the
> biggest part. Alt and title's don't take too long to put in.
> Accessibility is often be taken to mean 'the content comes out in a
> text
> reader' because it's something concrete and measurable but there are a
> lot of other groups to deal with than the visually impaired who also
> have access and knowledge of screen readers. Degrees of sightedness are
> much more common so resizable fonts, good contrast (black on grey
> rather
> than the grey on grey that so many designers I've worked with seem to
> love), don't rely on colour to indicate navigation clues.
> Colourblindness is very common so designs need to be run through some
> filters at least. Mental models of the web site architecture have to be
> considered: does a visitor know where they are within a site and know
> how to get back to where they started, are there multiple ways of
> navigating the site. How do you convey structured information to
> someone
> who has an unsupported browser (giving someone with Netscape 3 or 4 a
> page of unformatted css-less text isn't always going to help them
> much),
> or let someone interact using a mechanical aid instead of a standard
> mouse. To be able to measure accessibility you'd really need to test a
> prototype on the groups that you are focusing on, which could be
> expensive, otherwise anything else is just a best guess.
>
> To produce a site with a 'good' degree of accessibility I'd estimate
> another 15-20% time on top of a 'normal' site. But that's assuming you
> make them 'quite' accessible as a matter of course (alt tags etc). I
> don't know about a truly accessible site because I don't think anyone's
> really done one yet, and I don't think anyone really has a formula as
> to
> how to make one. Personally, I find even the RNIB site hard to navigate
> as some decent typography, text layout and a bit more heirarchy would
> help me to understand the information, which I think is because the
> RNIB
> are very focussed on one specific accessibility issue.
>
> My rather longer than I expected 2p,
> Karl