Web accessibility means making webpages accessible especially to people with disabilities (for example people with problems such as visual impairment) so that they can perceive, understand, navigate, generally interact but also contribute to the Web. Web Accessibility also benefits older people with changing abilities due to aging.
If you design Accessible websites you can often enhance usability for ALL users. Good design can also simplify the access for automated software programs that read website content, so here we go again.. Search Engines!
An important aspect of Accessibility is to let people access content in their preferred way. For example, some users may prefer to alter the presentation of information (read CSS) because they are using a very small display on a mobile phone, they would prefer to adjust the text size, or they may need to use keystrokes because they don’t have a mouse.
Other examples: People with visual impairments or dyslexia may want to change the colours of text or the background to make a combination easier to read. Users with dyslexia or ADHD (Attention – deficit / hyperactivity disorder) may have problems if there are moving images on the screen while they are reading, as they are easily distracted. People with ADHD may also have problems if there are too many links with so many options to choose.
Conclusion: Designing websites in accordance with Web Accessibility principles is necessary to enable access for all users.
Make your website Accessible
Making a website accessible can be simple or complex. It depends by many factors such as the type of content, the size and complexity of the site and so on.
I strongly suggest to implement Accessibility features from the beginning of the website development or redesign. Fixing inaccessible websites could require significant effort, especially if they were not originally designed and “coded” properly with standard XHTML markup, or if they have multimedia contents.
Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), part of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), develops guidelines for Web Accessibility, support materials to help understand and implement it.
The document “Implementation Plan for Web Accessibility” lists the basic steps for implementing accessibility in Web projects. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines documents provide detailed information for website developers.
There are even Evaluation Tools that help with evaluation, but in my opinion, in the end human evaluation is required to determine if a site is really accessible or not.
I’m disabled. My magical helper is my PC. Visiting art galleries and participating in writing groups would make me very tired, but the Internet lets me enjoy the same comfortably from home. Being blind for example would make desktop wallpapers useless, but I could still listen to some poetry reading. Even on the worst days I could spend few time on the computer. 3C 5F 1N is much better than no human interaction.
- Anonymous
