Understanding Website Accessibility

Posted on Monday, November 14th

A buzz word floating around the web design community these days is accessibility. Many web designers now make it a point to let everyone know that they produce sites that are accessible. So what the heck is this all about?

Accessibility means exactly what you think. It refers to how well different people can access the information on your site. Sounds simple enough, right? Not exactly.

A website that is completely accessible will render properly across all operating systems and browsers. An accessible website will be flexible to accommodate people who have the text size on their browser changed for easier reading. An accessible website should even re-format itself properly when viewed on devices like PDAs and cell phones!

Oh, there's more. An accessible website should even gracefully degrade for devices like screen readers, which are devices blind people use to access information on the internet. There was a point when I for one had no idea that blind people even used the internet, let alone how.

That out of the way, the point of this article is to provide some incredible, eye-opening links that will really put you into the mindset of someone to whom accessibility really matters.

The following links will take you to sites that have some video footage of screen reader in use, and the particular problems these users face in general and when encountering websites. I was blown away by these videos and will always keeps the facts laid out within when designing sites for anyone.

http://www.doit.wisc.edu/accessibility/video/intro.asp
Neal Ewers of the Trace Research Center demonstrates how screen readers assist people who are blind navigate the web, access the electronic page and more.

http://www.doit.wisc.edu/accessibility/video/screen_magnification.asp
Neal Ewers of the Trace Research Center and John Klatt, a graduate student at the University of Madison explain how screen magnification software works.

These videos serve up some great information for web designers as well as anyone who currently has a website. I highly recommend viewing both as it literally changed the way I design websites forever. 

(Updated on 11/15/2005)
Here's one more great link: http://www.drc-gb.org/newsroom/website4.asp
This page actually allows to simulate the screen reader process on a pretend website yourself to suffer the frustration that screen reader users deal with on a regular basis when surfing the web for information.

 

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