Web
Site Accessibility -- Part One
by Beth Tang
Wait, you're not done yet. Just because the content has been dropped in your page template, there are still some items on your web development-to-production checklist that need your attention. Have you asked or considered such questions as:
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Why should we bother with checking for usability and accessibility?
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Our target audience isn't people with disabilities?
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Isn't accessibility a lot of work?
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Why not a text-only site, too?
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We run Bobby and it will take care of it all, right?
Let's address each of these.
Why bother?
Accessibility and usability are independent from content. People will come to your site because they've heard that you've got a great widget that is the talk of all the tech rags. These same people will leave after a very short time if they cannot find what they are looking for. Good information architecture is key; it's the design, the ability to maneuver around and find the information needed to complete a task.
For usability-related issues, be sure to bookmark, learn by rote, and take to heart the wisdom at Jakob Nielsen's site
(useit.com).
Accessibility as a recent issue has come to the forefront with the recent release of federal regulations — known as Section 508 — in late March, with comments that were due at the end of May. These federal guidelines mandate that federal agencies' web sites (along with other electronic and information technology procurements [E&IT]) be made accessible for people with disabilities as of August 7, 2000. You can find out more about the training that the government is offering at the
GSA IT policy web site, and at the special web site set up just for
Section 508. The
Access Board is responsible for crafting the E&IT guidelines.
Recent news tells us that the Section 508 guidelines will actually become effective probably in the spring of next year. There is a good faith effort, however, of making federal agencies' home pages plus the top 20 pages accessible by July 26, 2000, in honor of the tenth anniversary of the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
You'll notice that we said that Section 508 pertains to federal government web sites. Section 508 incorporates guidance from the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C)
Web Accessibility Initiative. While dot-coms are not required to meet these accessibility guidelines, it is still good form to incorporate them.
Your target audience
To paraphrase that famous cartoon, on the Internet no one knows you're a person with a disability. There are lots of reasons why, even as a business (read, non-government) web site, you will want to make sure your site is accessible. The main reason is that, as a web designer or developer, there is no way to know the particular characteristics of your individual users — aside from gender, etc. — that may be known as part of a registration/login process. Therefore, it is important that you plan for as many contingencies as within reason.
For example, with good design, even your users with disabilities will be able to navigate through your site and complete their tasks just as your "mainstream" users do. Simple things like well-crafted alt tags (or longdesc or d-links) will not only help the individual using a screen reader, but also the person with the graphics turned off, to know if an image is there just to be pretty or serves as a link to another page or site.
You can read more about the
business-based reasons for making sites accessible at
the Web Developers Journal page on the topic.
Isn't it a lot of work?
Yes and no. In designing and developing the web site, you plan for different browsers and different versions of browsers, as well as different platforms and connections. The same effort toward such flexibility should be built in to the design and layout of the web site to allow for as much usability and accessibility. To retrofit a site, as the federal government is doing, could end up being an overly laborious effort; however, if the most commonly accessed sites are dealt with first, then subsequent efforts can be planned to appropriately address accessibility concerns.
There are things that you can do right now to start down the road of accessibility. They include:
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Developing a long-term business/marketing plan for your web site if one doesn't exist already
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Incorporating a plan for a short- and long-term phasing-in of accessibility compliance
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Checking out the web sites mentioned in this article for online resources/tools and guidance to check the accessibility of your web site — see also
Web Pages That Suck and pick up a copy of Nielsen's
Designing Web Usability and the O'Reilly book
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web by Rosenfeld and
Morville.
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Researching and incorporating meta tags that contain highly relevant keywords
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Using this opportunity to check/edit/delete broken links, and updating and consolidating web site content and information where necessary
Your site gets the benefit of a facelift and you now have a tool to help you focus on the specific parts that need immediate attention. This effort benefits everyone, not just people with disabilities.
Text only
Don't do it, unless it is absolutely necessary. Even the Access Board at the March 31, 2000, press briefing discouraged it. It is extra work that no one wants to take on; the secondary site will be treated for what it is — secondary. You're already busy with developing the marketing and compliance phasing-in plan to spend more time updating two concurrent sites. That said, if you must have an all-Flash site, however, then it's pretty likely you might want to consider developing a text-only site.
You may be tempted to go overboard with this text-only site. Don't. Fancy text or where color is the sole means to convey information can cause problems for people with colorblindness or with vision problems. Using a style sheet (CSS), along with black characters on a white background, can help with faster reading for everybody (see
User Interface Design Update, May 2000). Allowing flexibility on the part of your users will likely lessen problems — and thus increase traffic — for that segment of your user population who need to overwrite your colors, font, and font size in order to make sense of what appears on the screen.
Bobby
Bobby (as in friendly policeman) is a tool to help make sure that your web site is accessible for people with disabilities. It has its own foibles, so do take some care in interpreting its results. Running Bobby is one of the first big steps in making your site accessible, but it cannot make
judgments about dynamically generated pages, so you will need to become somewhat familiar with general accessibility principles. Part two of this article will help you.
What next?
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