27 October 2007

Accessibility refers to making a website available to all people including those that may have different abilities, or disabilities.

What would happen if a blind person, of someone with a vision impairment visited your site? Would they be able to browse the site and easily find what they are looking for?

Legal obligations

If you don't think this affects your website, think again. Earlier this month, a class action was filed against Target.com which may result in a California law that websites must be made accessible. Target argued that the laws in regards to accessibility only applied to physical business sites, however the Court stated “whatever goods or services the place [of business] provides, it cannot discriminate on the basis of disability in providing enjoyment of those goods and services". Target isn’t the only company who has found themselves in hot water over accessibility, the Victorian Government website has more information on other website accessibility legal cases. http://www.egov.vic.gov.au/index.php?env=-categories:m427-1-1-8-s-0

Financial and positive feedback benefits

But it’s not just a matter of potential legal responsibility, having a site that is accessible to the most number of users can also bring in greater income and positive feedback for the company. Statistics show that disabled people make up around 15% of the general population, and this doesn’t include users who may just prefer reading sites in larger font, or people who have slow internet speeds, or have access to different software and operating systems. This is a large amount of people who could potentially be missing out on what your organisation has to offer.

Higher search engine ranks

Sites that follow accessibility guidelines also rank better in search engines as one of the key components of accessibility is ensuring that a text version is available, which is what search engines use to reference pages.

A couple of small steps to make websites more accessible

Use alternate text for images.

While this is only a small step it makes a huge difference. These days some websites have their navigation and headings built using images, so if the images didn’t display or we were unable to read them, we would not be able to navigate the site.

Limit the use of flash

We hardly ever use flash, as it is presents a lot of accessibility and potential usability issues. If flash is used, we always strive to find a secondary way to present the information to users who cannot access flash.

Use semantic markup

When a screen reader reads out a web page, it also reads out some of the code to tell the user what kind of content they are reading. For example if they are reading a list and it has been coded correctly, it will tell them that this is a list, and may even tell them how many items are in the list. It’s the small differences like this that make it easier for blind users to understand the structure and content of a web page.

Allow resizing of text

Many users stuggle to read the small font sizes used my most websites. By using flexible font sizes, users can increase (or decrease) text size in their browser. You can try this now by using one of a couple of methods:

• On the keyboard, press CTRL and the plus (+) sign at the same time
• Using both a keyboard and a mouse with a scroll wheel, you can click CTRL and then increase/decrease the size using the scroll wheel on the mouse
• From your browser menu select view and look for font/text size.

Use CSS to separate the content from the presentation

Colour blind users may find it easier to read a page in pure black and white. If all presentation styles are contained in stylesheets, users can simply turn off the stylesheets and view the content in plain text, providing that the content has been correctly structured in the code

Only use tables to structure code which should be in table format

Before CSS and stylesheets, web designers had to create web pages using tables to structure their format. Sadly there are still many designers who use this method which results in slow loading pages (from all the extra code) and un-accessible pages. As mentioned previously, screen readers tell users what kind of content it is, for example ‘Table header’, ‘table body’ etc. Now imagine trying to listen to a web page being read to you where everything was wrapped in a table. It would make for a very frustrating and confusing experience.

This is just a very brief introduction to accessibility and the steps that can be taken to improve accessibility. For a full list of guidelines, please refer to the W3C Web Content Accessibility guidelines 1.0 at http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/.