Have you heard statements such as those listed here?
This course needs to be made accessible.
This website satisfies the conformance levels: "A", "Double-A".
The alt text for the image is instructionally useless.
Do these statements sound familiar yet nebulous? Do you want to understand
accessibility and its need before you implement it? In my opinion,
we can only begin to appreciate accessibility if we feel the need
for it! It isn’t easy for most of us, as we don’t know
what it is to not be able to do certain things. We can’t place
the feelings that we’ve never experienced.
Here is a beautiful story about three fairies that will help you
experience some of those feelings.
This is exactly what we need to do with our content. We need to
make it accessible. The example was a metaphor, but if you review
your feelings when you saw the jumbled characters on the screen,
you will see traces of frustration. This frustration magnifies manifold
for those whose need to know extends beyond reading a short story.
The objective of this article is to create an awareness of the “who”,
“what”, and “how” of web-accessibility.
W3C identifies a list of users who could be looking for information
on the Internet but they may be constrained by conditions such as:
Difficulty in either seeing or hearing information (blindness,
deafness, partial blindness, color-blindness.)
Difficulty in understanding the written word (Dyslexia)
Difficulty in accessing the keyboard, using the mouse (Repetitive
Stress Injury or RSI, motor disability)
Difficulty in downloading graphic/media heavy pages (slow internet
connection, browser that doesn’t show images.)
Difficulty arising out of old-age sight-related problems (focus,
short-sightedness)
Difficulty in comprehending, navigating the interface, due to
temporary environmental problems such as noisy places etc.
In order to make sure that web content remains accessible to these
users, W3C provides detailed guidelines that can be followed for
making web content more accessible. This article endeavors to build
relevance for these guidelines, which will help Instructional Designers
become more aware of why they are doing certain activities that
pertain to accessibility. The knowledge of “why” is
necessary because it will help you connect with the disabled user
and help you make your content sensibly accessible.
Here I list some important guidelines along with their context.
I think what we should try to do is understand the context and remember
that there is an accessibility guideline for it. The guidelines
are easily available on the net. You will find the list of sites
at the end of this article tremendously helpful.
Some Important Guidelines and their contexts
Provide useful textual information against the graphics and
animations used in web content. Assistive technologies, such as
screen readers and braille output devices, can read the text aloud
for the completely and partially blind users, but they cannot
“read” graphics and animations.
Provide textual information either through Alt text (used for
buttons and other simple graphics) or Long Desc (used for images
that require long descriptions, and also for animations) tags.
It is important to remember that we need to provide “instructionally
relevant” description here.
Try to provide the auditory counterpart of visual content for
users who have a motor disability combined with some form of blindness.
Also provide transcripts of the spoken dialog and narration to
ensure that the users who suffer from auditory problems are not
marginalized.
Any Markup language (such as HTML) has a specification. In
order to ensure that your content remains accessible, ensure that
the specifications of the Markup language are followed. Here are
a few examples of what constitutes content creation within specifications.
Use structural elements of HTML only for structural purposes
and not for presentation. Browsers are built to allow content
transformation to different accessibility devices depending
upon the requirement, but they can do so only when we ensure
that we do not use structural element of HTML (such as TABLE,
FONT, H1, H2…etc.) just for presentation purposes. It
so happens that the content of a TABLE is transformed into
textual information for the screen-reader or braille display
in a particular sequence, and if you have used the TABLE tag
just for making the content look pretty, it will not transform
well.
Use the H tag for headings (not for emphasis,) in tables
use TH and TD, instead of making the heading bold. Adherence
to these simple specifications ensures that the screen readers
and other user agents understand the difference and read the
content accordingly.
Don’t use images as a substitute for mathematical
and scientific symbols. They cannot be understood by assistive
technologies. If you want to write a mathematical equation,
instead of creating a gif, use MathML.
Steer clear of the deprecated elements. The assistive technologies
work around the most current versions of different markup languages.
Blinking text is a strict No-No as there are users who can experience
problems in focusing (some may also have seizures due to flashing
and flickering of the screen,) if the page refresh rate is too
high.
Other than the guidelines listed above there are guidelines
that pertain to older browsers, device-independent access, and
use of new technologies. The links given at the end of this page
will help you build your awareness of accessible web-content design.
The above guidelines are indicative of what accessible design entails.
We should feel the need to make our content accessible only then
will we appreciate why we should conform to these guidelines. We
should also remember that in the US and some other countries, all
governmental sites, and all educational and other sites that are
connected to the government by way of grants or otherwise, need
to implement accessible web-design in their websites, and online
material.
Depending on the guidelines that you decide to follow, and the
depth to which you decide to follow them, your content becomes conformant
to the W3C accessibility guidelines. There are three levels of conformance.
Usually your project specifications will list all the guidelines
that have to be followed (Naturally, these guidelines will be a
sub-set of the guidelines given by the W3 consortium.)
Though you may find these reasons enough to convert you into an
accessibility-proponent, there is yet another one. Pages that have
accessibility built-in are more effective even for the regular user,
than pages that don’t. Remember Dale’s cone of experience,
we remember 20% of what we see and 10% of what we hear, but 30%
of what we see and hear. Then, of course, easy navigation never
hurt anyone.
I stop here with a hope that this article will change the way we
look at accessibility and the need of those who require accessible
design will drive higher our need to create it for them.
2. The web page at http://www.mandarindesign.com/uie.html
has some very interesting and useful links. I recommend that you
perform the color-blindness check on a site of your choice. The
results will surprise, and I hope, inspire you.
5. The most important URL is http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/.
This URL gives us the W3C guidelines for making web-content accessible.
The guidelines are available as pdf, html zip archive, and text
file. Choose the one you find most convenient and read through it.
The site
requires Internet Explorer 5.5 / Netscape 6 or higher and best viewed on a resolution
of 1024 X 768 with true color..
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