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Web accessibility in Hastings
Published: September 14, 2005
The Broadband Centre's web accessibility conference, hosted by myself, advocated by Captain Access and run at the University Centre Hastings is finally over and feedback suggests it was a huge success. There were some late arrivals picking up attendance at the last minute which further showed Hastings is the town looking forward in web technologies.
Despite studying the standards, web technologies and knowing about many of the assistive devices and tools available, I had never seen them manually implemented and this was the most valuable and informative knowledge I had gained in a long time.
The main tools displayed
Theresa Hodge, herself visually impared and a regular user of the tools listed below demonstrated to the audience how she navigates the web, shops online and generally uses the internet for her business with Jaws and Zoomtext.
Despite the power of the tools and the functionality available to users, most settings are turned off or not used. Maybe, as with any Windows application, complexity is best avoided. Even people in the IT industry avoid using all options and settings on an application, why should Jaws or Zoomtext users be any different.
Another tool displayed was the IBM Home Page Reader. This was an lighter-weight and cheaper version of Jaws which manipulates the page but heavily relies on good structure, headers and descriptive links. We also had a look at the inbuilt Windows accessibility features like screen magnifier which does a poor job of zooming text but it is included in the operating system.
Accessibility lessons learnt
Jon Gooday from AbilityNet done a sterling job of breaking down the WCAG and putting the practicalities of accessibility into perspective. Nikki Rae from Maxima Consult showed us how a perfectly attractive website became a usability nightmare when people scratched the surface started to use the website. Together with Mike, Theresa and Dennis from East Sussex Disability Association, everyone left feeling they had learnt something and had goals to reach.
The aim of the event was awareness. Awareness drives standards up and together, we can all make Hastings the town to visit when looking for an accessible, usable and powerful website.
Points to mention
What surprised me was the importance of links, titles and website addresses. Aside from the obvious web standards, CSS layouts and the guidelines for accessibility, other factors which are often overlooked have a huge impact on the web and it's use for people.
While Theresa demonstrated the assistive tools to us, many times she focused on the address bar and typed in a URL. This makes the method of simple addressing a necessity. If you can avoid it and you use Apache, forget querystrings and use mod_rewrite if possible. Otherwise, stick with simple names and directory structures.
Page titles get read out on load too. Keep them concise and descriptive because spammy long phrases are boring to hear [but can be skipped].
Links were the shocker and certainly made me check my site over and over. One of the most commonly used features was to list the links on a page. Most people know that links should be descriptive. This assists the search engines and users but you have to be very careful when naming links. As the links appear in a listbox and are sorted alphabetically, they need to begin with the subject of the destination.
An example is:
A screen reader user displays the links in a listbox and is looking for the news section. Typically the user types the letter 'N' to find the link that leads to the news, but if the link text says 'The News', then the user needs to type 'T' and scroll through while listening to the audio until they find the right one. This is time consuming and a nuisance for many users so give your website and your clients website a once over to see if there are improvements that can be made to the naming of links.
If you have to use images for the buttons in your navigation, always use the alt attribute to describe the link so it gets read out when screen reading. Validation will force this too. The reason is that using a zoom facility is next to useless on images as they pixelate and become unreadable so tend to be screen read instead. Best option is to use text and CSS to style buttons appropriately.
Finally
The Captain Access website was primarily a means of taking bookings and informing people about the event. To supercede this I will [eventually] create a resource for website developers in the fields of accessibility and even setup a forum for use within the community. If you have any further questions regarding accessibility and the internet I have listed the presenters email addresses below for your reference.
- Jon Gooday - AbilityNet
- Nikki Rae - Maxima Consult
- Edward Clarke - TN38 Consulting
- Theresa Hodge - East Sussex Disability Association
- Dennis Yates - East Sussex Disability Association
sounds like it went really well. I picked the report of this up through Technorati.com by the way.
All the best