Web Accessibility

I attended the Web Directions conference last week. One of the eye-opening sessions (at least for me) was “Accessibility 2.0” and “Designing for Accessibility: More simple techniques that make a difference” by Derek Featherstone from FurtherAhead.

Accessibility is about allowing disabled people to use our website. I have never worked on a project that would require access by people with disabilities. I think it really takes a real life experience to realize what these people must go through in their everyday lives. Why should we make it more difficult for them with our web applications? Do you know how many web applications stop working when you switch JavaScript off? You would be surprised to see how big number that is.

There are some guidelines that we can follow in order to make our websites more accessible. If we remove frames, replace menu images with menu using text and CSS, don't use tables for formatting, we make a big step towards accessibility of our websites. Another thing is having PDF documents on the website. PDFs are not accessible and they also need to be downloaded in order to read them and find out that it's not the document that we wanted. Another place for improvement are the web forms. Fields should have labels.

The phrase “people with disabilities don't go to our website” is just a nonsense. They do and they can also bring some revenue. Take for example Tesco Access. Grocery shopping on the web is an ideal service for visually-impaired customers. Imagine trying to tell a can of beans from a can of tomatoes on the shelf if you can't see the labels. Then think about having the description read to you by your computer. Their website was designed for accessibility and because of this feature it boosted revenue by another 4%.

Accessibility is personal. Removing barriers, user testing is personal.

Where do I go from here? Well, I will start at the roots – W3C Web Accessibility Initiative and Section 508. Then I will read Dive into Accessibility book that according to its website answers two questions “Why should I make my web site more accessible?” and “How can I make my web site more accessible?” Australia with its Disability Discrimination Act is six years ahead of USA.

I also found The Illinois Center for Instructional Technology Accessibility very informative. They list the best practices, have software for download (Accessibility Extensions for Mozilla/Firefox lives here) and lots more. Another great resource for developers is Evaluating Web Sites for Accessibility with Firefox by Patrick H. Lauke.

Some of these guidelines are very much a checklist approach. User experience is more important. Therefore we need to sit down with the real user, the one that will be using the system, and work together in order to fulfill the user's needs and expectations of this system.

Good Design in Practice

I attended the first day of the Web Directions South 2006 conference today. Some of the topics that were covered today were about the design of the web sites and web pages or the design in general. Since I read The Design of Everyday Things by Donal A. Norman (which I mentioned in one of my previous posts about Good Desing) I tend to look at things in a different way. And I also appreciate the good design of the things we use. A thing can have all it needs but if not designed well it will fail as it will be unusable (see the cover of the book and you'll get the idea at least – or read the whole book).

There was one of the things that I use in my everyday life, but only today I realized how brilliantly it was designed. Derek Featherstone has apparently same eye as me as he showed us the photo that he took the day before. It was a photo of

The pedestrian crossing button

How perfect it is! Not only you can see the big white arrow but if your eyesight is impaired you can touch and feel the smaller raised arrow. And that is not all! If you cannot see it, you can hear it ticking when the green light is on. And that still is not all! If you cannot see nor hear, you can still feel it. The button VIBRATES!!! Derek said it at the conference and was all excited about it. I did not believe. I had to touch it on my way home from the conference. It is true! It does vibrate!

How cool is that?! That is a successful design in practice. Way to go designers!

What is next? Well, as a software developer I will focus a bit more on designing the web applications in a way that all people can access them, even if they have some disabilities. Sometimes we go and design things that are cool, but not usable by all of us...