Accessibility
Make a site accessible for the people who have some disabilities is a huge task and a lot of misunderstandings circulate on the web.
In a recent past, I used a lot some tools like Bobby.
With this last one, you can go to their site, enter a URL and see if your site is Bobby AAA approved.
Believe me, a web log is not automatically approved by Bobby; try it with this web log home page!
It's quite difficult to pass the test, and in the same time, it's important to keep a sense of design for a site, like the one I manage actually, Scoilnet.
My actual idea to achieve that is with .Net, it will certainly be possible to play with the pages.
I will start certainly by having the page built as controls driven, and Scoilnet is already done like that.
The snippet I think about is to search the different controls on the page, the one which need to be Bobby compliant, replace them on the fly.
Doing so will my dynamic content intact, and adding a 'touch' of design in the accessible page.
I have the chance to work with some people specialist in special needs requirements, and it's a wrong idea to think that accessibility is synonym with test only.
You have many degrees of disabilities, and I think a good approach would be to propose gradually a specific page, without removing the essence of the site.
You can have for example on a first level the images, you can also provide a way to hide the images on a request.
The most important thing is to check also with a screen reader machine that the text can be interpreted properly.
If your site is on 3 vertical columns, you must transform the columns in a horizontal way, so that the screen reader can read the lines of text continuously.
It's sad, but too much 'big' web sites are still not done for an accessibility version. I saw also some sites with a static content on the accessible version, of course totally
unsynchronized with the normal dynamic content version.
For example Microsoft don't provide 'Accessible' link on their navigation menu or on their pages. What you have to do is to open a dropdown and ask for Microsoft Accessibility!
And only at this level you can find a Microsoft Home -Text version which gives you the right Text version. So it's bit sad that you need to be assisted to navigate on the site.
Of course this is just one example. I mentioned this one because I am a Microsoft developer but its absolutely the case almost everywhere.
If you have some interest on the subject, you should see FrontEnd website. they have a Usability Info centre, the Accessible Version link is clearly on the top of each page, and they have as you can see on the screenshot a sense of design, including images.
They are also like the others sites not compliant with Bobby, but as I said before, it's quite difficult to be fully compliant.
But I tested the page with a screen reader, and its ok, no errors produced, and it looks surely not like a fancy website, but something like a blog.
Another misunderstanding is about web controls. Most screen readers can now understand a dropdown, select an element, or tick a checkbox.
Obviously, this can add more tasks to achieve for a developer, but how can you are satisfied if you don't target 100% of your audience?
I certainly invite the readers of this blog to give a more important place for the accessibility subject, and you will see that you can learn from that some key elements on usability too.
Of course if you want to share your own experience, just comment this blog.
Myself I am close to finish applying this to Scoilnet, and I will surely share through an article the knowledge I gain from that.