evo design - graphics, photography, web

  • Accessibility in a Nutshell

    05
    Mar

    Ensuring your website can be used by everyone is not simply about law and ethics, it makes great business sense.

    For many years businesses have been required by law to ensure their premises are disability friendly.  In particular retail facilities must ensure appropriate placement of lifts, toilets, hand rails and ramps so that anybody in a wheelchair can enjoy the same shopping experience as those on foot.

    There is already legislation in place to ensure businesses maximise the usability of their website for those with disabilities.

    It stands to reason that your website, the digital representation of your business, should abide by the same laws and ethical codes as your bricks and mortar namesake.  And not surprisingly it does.  There is already legislation in place to ensure businesses maximise the usability of their website for those with disabilities.

    The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, as published by the W3C offers a comprehensive set of benchmarks and suggestions to maximise the accessibility of a website.  Version 2.0 of the WCAG was released in December 2008, yet in spite of version 1.0 being published in 1999 the vast majority of websites fail to deploy even the most basic guidelines.

    The vast majority of websites fail to deploy even the most basic guidelines.

    What exactly is an accessible website?  Unfortunately for those affected, if you don’t have a disability you are unlikely to have experienced the frustration caused by inaccessibility.  To better understand the problems we should look briefly at the range of disabilities that affect access to the Web.  These can include visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive and neurological disabilities.  These may manifest themselves as partial blindness, total blindness, deafness, colour blindness, range of motion, broken limbs to mild and severe neurological disabilities.

    Millions of people across the UK and the world have such disabilities and as such many have adapted special techniques for computer interaction.  These may be through the use of built in operating systems tools such as screen readers, high contrast displays, screen zooming, flashing mouse cursors, keyboard only navigation, mouse only navigation or they may involve the use of sophisticated hardware and/or software from 3rd parties.

    A huge number of websites do not even offer basic text resizing.

    A huge number of websites do not even offer basic text resizing - allowing long sighted or partially blind individuals to maximise the size of on screen text.  Often websites are incompatible (through structure and design) with screen reading software.  Poor colour choices and contrasts can prevent colour blind individuals from using a website.  Websites featuring large amounts of un-transcribed video, animation, flashing lights or conversely those relying heavily on audio can render themselves useless to some groups.

    To offer a small example, hover your mouse over the image below.  This is how the top of this article may look for somebody long or partially sighted.  Preventing the web browser’s built in text sizing controls from working, as many designers will do, would clearly render this page useless.

    Could you deal with this?

    Many people with disabilities will have their browsers set to turn off website style-sheets and/or pictures to simply receive the plain text content.  As such all the time and money spent getting that swanky looking Flash site will be un-useable and hence ignored by this group.

    So why do we care?  First and foremost everybody should care from an ethical standpoint.  We aren’t talking 2 or 3 people, we are talking millions of the population who play an active and contributory role in society, to simply ignore them should ‘feel’ wrong.

    People with disabilities represent an enormous demographic that, at the moment, is massively under-catered for on the web.

    But if you need hard and fast business reasons you should consider this.  There are thousands of businesses out there competing for the same customers.  Finding competitive edge in today’s hardened markets is a challenge even for the best companies.  People with disabilities represent an enormous demographic that, at the moment, is massively under-catered for on the web.  If you website is truly accessible you are tapping a market your competition is most likely missing.

    Is that it?  Most of the guidelines laid down in the WCAG fit hand in glove with the latest techniques for Search Engine Optimisation.  The more accessible your website, the better it will index and vice versa. 

    Accessibility doesn’t just improve usability for those with disabilities.  The unquantifiable ease with which many of the top sites operate is not happy accident - most of it will be borne out of strict adherence to accessibility guidelines.

    The unquantifiable ease with which many of the top sites operate is not happy accident - most of it will be borne out of strict adherence to accessibility guidelines.

    The most successful websites are playing an active role in the community.  Offering relevant information, products and services to the widest possible audience, at lightening speeds and with minimum user stress and maximum user expectation.

    It’s never been less important to focus on silly gimmicks (the web of the 90s) and concentrate on building strong reputation by exceeding user expectations.

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    Usability