What is web accessibility?
In my opinion the whole point of the Internet is the expansion of human communication! For the web this means that your information is accessible across many languages, browsers, operating systems and screen sizes. A thoughtful web designer will also take into account the various means people use to interact with computers themselves. Websites then should be constructed allowing for the probability that someone out there will be unable to use a mouse.
Many web designers fail to take this into account. As a result some sites are less accessible to people with disabilities than others. Most sites have navigation links front and center. This makes perfect sense for most people but it doesn't serve everyone well. Disabled people are sometimes forced to tab through more than a hundred links in some cases before reaching the main content of a page. Skip navigation links solve this problem nicely. Blind people commonly use special software that actually reads your website to them. If you don't offer the opportunity to skip to the main content then they may use another site or simply be unable to access necessary areas of a site completely.
Choosing Colors
Approx. 8% to 12% of European men are colorblind. Only one half of one percent of European women are colorblind. This means that if you design your site with a poor selection of colors (which you may like) you may actually be choosing colors which are essentially invisible to one in ten men. There are a number of resources out there to help. There used to be lots of concern over "web safe colors" and the W3C core styles exist in hope that some standardization might occur.
The really important thing is to make sure that the difference between background color and the text and link colors aren't difficult to read.
Graceful Degradation
for websites this means that if someone views your site with Java, images and your specific styling turned off, it remains completely functional albeit not as "pretty". In other words, my pages are designed to fall apart gracefully in the event that a specific browser can't make sense of it. You can see this page without its style sheet by selecting "None" under themes. As you may notice I've placed all the content at the "natural" top of the page. Using css I put navigation where I want it. It ends up being very conveniently printer and browser friendly.
I design my sites knowing that it will ultimately be viewed and interacted with many different ways. Many people surf the Internet with images turned off. So I ask myself; does my site have meaning under these conditions? and if web designers keep these points in mind as they design, their websites will degrade gracefully.
So as I build a site, I try navigating the page without the mouse. I turn images off and see if it still has meaning. I turn off the style sheet and see how the site looks in its bare bones code. I re-size the text in five different browsers on two different screen sizes and see what happens. Only when I've seen all possible views of a site retain functionality do I consider it completely accessible.
If you're concerned with accessibility issues and interested in getting my help on a project call for a quote today at 317-654-5260 or leave me a detailed message using this contact form.
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Accessibility Statement
