Web Design for the Disabled
Research
| Personal (?) | Newsgroups (?) | Other (?) | Tested by author | |
| Adaptive keyboard | 2 | 5 | 6 | yes |
| Eye tracking | 0 | 0 | 1 | no |
| Head wand | 0 | 0 | 2 | no |
| Mouth stick | 0 | 0 | 2 | yes |
| One handed keyboard | 1 | 0 | 0 | no |
| Over sized trackball mouse | 0 | 0 | 1 | no |
| Refreshable braille | 4 | 8 | 12 | no |
| Screen magnifier | 3 | 2 | 4 | yes |
| Screen reader | 5 | 10 | 7 | no |
| Text browser | 3 | 12 | 5 | yes |
| Voice recognition | 1 | 3 | 4 | yes |
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Interpretation of the results
The questions the contacted people were asked during research:
- "What are the main obstacles limiting your possibilities?"
- "What could web designers do to help you?"
- "In which order do you expect the site navigation, main navigation and content when visiting a web site?"
The first question ("What are the main obstacles limiting your possibilities?") brought a wide variety of answers. Participants with visual impairments, excluding full blindness, mentioned completely inaccessible sites followed by too small font size. Web users with motor disabilities had trouble with links that are so small that it is difficult to hit them with the cursor. Fully blind users mentioned images without alternative text and "click here"-links which annoy when jumping from link to link with an audio browser.
Many did not know why they could not access the web page, due to their technical knowledge in this sector.
The answers to the second question ("What could web designers do to help you?") depended on the technical background of the participant. Those with knowledge about web techniques nearly all mentioned the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines set up by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). According to these disabled users, the guidelines are a real help for making the web more accessible.
The users without HTML and similar knowledge often mentioned techniques that correspond to the official guidelines of the W3C, like alternative texts for images and easily adjustable font size.
"First main navigation, then site navigation followed by the pages content" was the most common answer for question three ("In which order do you expect the site navigation, main navigation and content when visiting a web site?"). Earlier it was said that the content should be the first in the pages source, so that screen readers do not always repeat the navigation. Some blind users said their software has features to skip the navigation. Others explained that they expect a site to be built that way because most people do it like that. So these people got used to what is provided and found a way to live with it.
All techniques that were affordable and possible were tested by the author. Techniques requiring high costs or the knowledge of braille for instance could not be tested.
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Sample web site
This is the
sample web site.
In addition to the print version of this text some examples are provided here, like audio examples, demonstrating how a web site sounds for visitors using screen readers.
Due to copyright regulations there are no photos of assistive hardware and their use in this document. External web links can be followed to other web sites providing such material.
The web site able.arto.ch complies with the accessibility guidelines recommended by the Web Consortium (W3C). On the sample site it is explained how one can perform some simple tests to check a sites quality of accessibility. This can be tried on the web site to this text.
When first checking the site with an accessibility validator two warnings were
shown. One for the missing tabindex attribute and one for missing access
keys.
The tabindex can be ignored because it can easily be jumped from one link to the
other by using the tab key. This attribute is very important for sites with many
links and where tabbing doesn't work the way the user would expect it.
Accesskeys are added to the site. Depending on the browser, they can be activated by first pressing the alt key (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox) and after the appropriate key Internet Explorer expects the user to press "Enter".