Website Accessibility
Just right this morning, I was flipping through TheStar’s In-tech section, and come across website accessibilities for the blind. This issue about disabled-friendly is not something new, yet not many are aware of it. Thus, some online-shopping companies got sued for this matter, of their website not accessible-friendly.
For majority of the people, they are used to rely on their eyes and a “rodent” when surfing the Internet. You see, people with visual problems which either can see partially or see nothing at all, requires a screen reader to tell them what is on a website, and browse through them only with a keyboard.
Some tips to website accessibility:
- For all the images, put something meaningful inside the ALT tag to describe the image.
- Use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to organise website contents.
- Make sure the text on your site is resisable with the browser’s text size settings.
- Drop the “click here” hyperlinks, write something with meanings, so user know what “click here” will take them.
- If the color contrast will hurt people with normal vision, forget about talking people who have poor eyesight, change the colors!
- Use DIV tags instead of TABLES, as they are unrecognisable by screen readers. (yes, i know it’s hard to do this too)
- Make sure you can navigate all your site content with only a keyboard, using Tab, Shift-Tab, Backspace and Enter keys.
- Avoid blinking or moving text please, at least for the important information.
There are more tips to go for, just look for them online and read them up. There’s also some tools offered by some sites to test website accessibility. For one, there this TAW Web Accessibility Test website.
Honestly, although my site is XHTML compliant, the TAW Web Accessibility Test site tool shows my site only passed through A analysis level, as there are 3 levels of analysis level, A, AA then AAA. A level is where a web developer must satisfy this checkpoint. AA level implies the web developer should satisfy this checkpoint, and AAA level indicates web developer may satisfy this checkpoint, based on the W3C’s Checklist of Checkpoints for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
For starters, you can try disable image loading for your browser, and turn off CSS to see if you can read anything from your site. And about the level analysis, I think I might have to review my site soon and hoping to get my site to pass through the AA and AAA level analysis too. 
April 9th, 2008 at 9:03 am
yeah, i read that somewhere else.
and there is a joke along with too much accesibility.
it is about a client who require the web developer to add a human avatar or somesort to display sign language, and at the same time, it require the avatar to read out the text.
they say it should consider the group where they are both blind AND deaf.
the irony in this is that, if someone is blind AND deaf, they couldn’t have read the website in any case.
April 9th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Hm, need to find out more about the screen readers - coz logically, if you have some tabular data, using th, tr and td actually helps in describing the data you have. The screen reader (or other tool) should know that, hey, this is a row header. DIVs don’t describe data at all.