Kathleen's Spider Web
~~Kathleen
Anderson, Spider
Web Woman Designs
Web Site
Accessibility
You
keep hearing this phrase more often these days – more and more web
sites you visit even have an ‘accessibility policy’ link on their
site, or a graphic that looks
like
this:
or this:
What
do they mean? Accessibility? Who (or what) is Bobby?
Web
site accessibility means making web sites accessible to persons with
disabilities. This month’s article focuses on three types of
visitors to your site and the problems they might encounter.
People
who cannot see will be unable to use the graphics or colors on your site
for navigation. To experience this for yourself, launch your browser (my
examples will use IE 5), and go to http://www.abcnews.com
and take a look at their use of graphics, especially the ones that are
links. Now, with the page still loaded, choose Tools | Internet
Options | Advanced in the Multimedia section, uncheck the “Show
pictures” box and click Apply. Reload the ABC News page in your
browser, and notice that the graphics are gone – in their place are
boxes with the words “Click here” (or worse, no words at all) in
them. “Click here”. Why? What’s going to happen when I do that?
There’s nothing there to let me know where you’re going to take me
when I click that link. What if it takes me to a page that’s going to
download something to my computer, or worse, to a site that I
shouldn’t be going to while I’m at work? There should be
something a bit more descriptive, don’t you think?
You
might be interested in knowing that another group of people for whom
this is an issue are people using low-end computers, with slow or
pay-per-minute connections. They turn off the images in their
browser to make web pages load faster.
OK,
you can turn the pictures back on now.
People
who don’t use a mouse will most likely be using only their keyboard
for navigating around your site. Bring up your favorite site in your
browser and then put away your mouse (don’t disconnect it – just
move it or put it on the floor). Now using only the Tab key, move around
the page until you find a link you want to try out, and hit the Enter
key. (Hint: Shift + Tab will let you tab in reverse, back towards the
top of the page.) One thing to look out for is the ‘tabbing order’
of the links on the page. Do they flow in some kind of logical order or
are they all over the place? With no logical order, getting to a
specific link is going to be very frustrating and time-consuming for
someone who can’t just ‘point and click’.
Something
else you might want to try sometime is going to your favorite online
shopping site, and see how well you can use the online order forms with
just your keyboard. Some of those forms with dropdown boxes and radio
buttons can be quite tricky, and sometime impossible, to use correctly
without a mouse.
Someone
with a hearing impairment is going to have a problem with a lot of the
multimedia content being delivered over the web today. As an example,
pay a visit to another popular news web site http://www.msnbc.com
and choose one of their Video or Live Video links. But first, turn off
your computer’s speakers. Do you have any idea what that newscaster is
saying? It sure would make more sense to you if the news broadcast
was close-captioned, wouldn’t it? They do it TV – why not on the
web?
OK
– who is Bobby? Bobby is a free service provided by the Center for
Applied Special Technology (CAST) to help Web page authors identify and
repair significant barriers to access by individuals with disabilities.
You can run Bobby against a single page on your site (or someone
else’s) by typing in the URL on this
page.
Or,
you can download Bobby and run it on your own computer against your
entire site (or someone else’s). Bobby checks your page for
accessibility, using the Web
Content Accessibility Guidelines at the W3C (that’s the other
logo). If your site passes the Bobby test, you are entitled to
place the Bobby logo on your page to show you that you took the time and
care to make your site accessible to persons with disabilities.
Next
month we’ll run a few web pages through Bobby and discuss the problems
we might find.
Kathleen
Anderson is a webmaster at the State
of Connecticut and chairs their committee on web site accessibility
for persons with disabilities. She also has her own web design company, Spider
Web Woman Designs.
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