Ab’s Blog

It’s easy for those of us who use a mouse or trackpad on a daily basis to forget that many people use computers without them. If you maintain web pages and are still looking for a New Year’s resolution, please consider working to eliminate “click” from your lexicon.

In most cases, you will find that it’s pretty easy to substitute “choose” or “use” for “click.” For example, “To look up an electronic journal, choose ‘metaLINK’ on the Libraries’ home page, then ‘Find e-Journal.’ ”

In other cases, no substitution is needed at all. Instead of, “Click here for more information” you can simply drop “Click here for” and make “More information” your link instead. Besides making your pages more inclusive, they will instantly look like they were created sometime after 1999, even if the content has been around a while!

I know I have pages out there that still say “click” and I’ll be trying to eliminate it from them all in the coming weeks.

How many opportunities do we have to dramatically improve people’s lives just by doing our job a little better? –Steve Krug, Don’t Make Me Think

I love this quote! There are a lot of things I can’t control, but this makes me feel good simply about adding some alt text to a web page. In fact, when Krug addresses fears that accessibility will mean more work, he mentions missing alt text as an example of something that is easy to fix.

Which is why it was so disheartening to hear recently that our metasearch vendor, which is supposed to release an upgrade soon that will significantly address accessibility problems, is planning to use the same generic alt text for all its resource icons rather than alt text specific to each icon. How this is supposed to help someone using a text browser or screen reader is beyond me, especially given that customers can create and add any icons they want. If the plan goes forward (and it may change), patrons will be clued into the fact that there is some sort of graphic associated with the record but–sorry!–they won’t be able to figure out exactly what it is.

Using alt text is the baby talk of accessibility. If you can’t get the other stuff right, or you’re still learning about it, or your organization doesn’t support something you’d like to do, at least get your alt text right, for goodness’ sake.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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