I just visited Web Accessibility for All, which is maintained by the Center for Education and Work at the University of Wisconsin. The site’s tagline is, “Failure is Not an Option.”
To gain some understanding of what people with impairments may see or hear on the web, try the following experiments:
- Using Firefox or Opera, try surfing the web with images, tables, and author-supplied color information turned off and font size doubled. Disable your mouse and use only the keyboard.
- Using a page reader such as JAWS or IBM Home Page Reader (trial available), try surfing the web with your monitor and mouse disabled. I don’t recommend doing this for more than about 15 minutes.
Not very fun, eh? Failure to ensure that our websites are accessible to our entire population of users can have disastrous consequences, not the least of which is that would-be patrons end up frustrated with the library and take their business elsewhere.
Creating websites with accessibility in mind doesn’t have to take much extra work. In fact, once you know the basics you may find that the same techniques that improve your site’s accessibility also make maintenance easier and allow for better viewing on handhelds, phones, and similar devices.
Resources:
- University of Illinois Course “Designing Universally Accessible Web Resources“: Excellent, in-depth online course
- Illinois Center for Instructional Technology Accessibility: Best practices, evaluation tools, software, links to other resources
- Web Accessibility for All: Tutorial section includes very specific topics, such as SPSS, PDF, and Office documents
- BBC’s My Web My Way: Loads of platform-specific tips for optimizing your browser, computer, keyboard, and mouse
- HTML Validator Firefox Extension: Very handy extension that uses an icon in your status bar to tell you whether the page you’re viewing validates and gives you accessibility warnings