The web environment is not an equal playing field for all of the individuals using it.  We all know of somebody whose eyesight is not as good as ours, or who may be a little hard of hearing like Mr Wallace!

 

What about people who have difficulty with movement or coordination?  All of these people have as much of a right to use your website as anybody else and we need to take them into consideration in our design work.

This is particularly important if you are working for a government organisation or perhaps a charity.  There may well be legal requirements for government organisations to adhere to where accessibility to web services is concerned.

So let’s look at the kinds of things that may hamper somebody’s experience using a website.

The fundamentals of accessibility have been laid out by the world wide web consortium. (w3.org). I’d like you to watch THIS VIDEO CLIP (less than 5 minutes) before continuing.

Web accessibility means that websites, tools, and technologies are designed and developed so that people with disabilities can use them. More specifically, people can:

• perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Web
• contribute to the Web

Web accessibility encompasses all disabilities that affect access to the Web, including:

• auditory
• cognitive
• neurological
• physical
• speech
• visual

Web accessibility also benefits people without disabilities, for example:

• people using mobile phones, smart watches, smart TVs, and other devices with small screens, different input modes, etc.
• older people with changing abilities due to ageing
• people with “temporary disabilities” such as a broken arm or lost glasses
• people with “situational limitations” such as in bright sunlight or in an environment where they cannot listen to audio
• people using a slow Internet connection, or who have limited or expensive bandwidth

It is essential that several different components of web development and

interaction work together in order for the web to be accessible to people with disabilities. These components include:

• content – the information in a web page or web application, including:
  • natural information such as text, images, and sounds
  • code or markup that defines structure, presentation, etc.
• web browsers, media players, and other “user agents”
• assistive technology, in some cases – screen readers, alternative keyboards, switches, scanning software, etc.
• users’ knowledge, experiences, and in some cases, adaptive strategies using the web
• developers – designers, coders, authors, etc., including developers with disabilities and users who contribute content
• authoring tools – software that creates websites
• evaluation tools – web accessibility evaluation tools, HTML validators, CSS validators, etc.

Think about users who have visual and auditory impairments.  (People have trouble seeing, including colour-blind people, and those who have trouble hearing.)

These people can use assistive technologies such as text to speech facilities (for visually impaired) and speech to text for those with hearing difficulties.  In addition alternative text and captions can be used on photographs of other diagrams to help those who cannot see so well.

You’re probably saying to yourself that Wallace has rocks in his head.  How can somebody who is unable to see a photograph possibly read a caption?  I’m glad you brought that up.  This is where text-to-speech facilities come in handy.  There are a number of facilities around that can convert the written word to a voice.  Steven Hawking is one of the most famous users of such technology.

Right now I am using a similar technology that is turning my voice into text to go on to this website.  Artificial intelligence and voice recognition technologies are improving every year.

It is up to you to ensure that your web design is accessible to all people who may wish to utilise your resources.  Predominantly that means visual, hearing or motor impairment.  Assistive technologies also exist for people who have trouble using a mouse or moving their arms and fingers.  Again Steven Hawking is a prime example of this.

Don’t forget that in order to access your website people have to find it.  This might sound a bit silly but part of your design process should involve taking into consideration how to ensure that websites such as Bing and Google end up indexing your work and returning it to customers who search for the kind of thing but you are providing.

This is called Search Engine Optimisation or SEO.  It is a massive topic and there are plug-ins available to help with optimising your site for indexing by search engines.  At school I go to great lengths to ensure that your sites are not accidentally indexed by Google as I do not want your schoolwork archived on the Internet forever.  That is why you clicked the box at the bottom of the page when you installed WordPress that said “discourage search engines”.  There is a search engine optimisation plug-in built into your WordPress installation.  We can look at this but please do not activate it.

Categories and tags play a small role in the searchability of your own site (using its own search bar) and used to play a fairly large role in major search engine indexing as well.

What you need to do now!

1. Research the web accessibility standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium at w3.org.Write a report (minimum of 500 words) that summarises the main six disabilities that impede people’s access to websites.  You will find these at W3.org.

2. Ensure that your report indicates ways that you can design your site to take these users needs into consideration.  Also try to find any legal requirements of the been published where a government organisation or charity is obliged to include certain facilities on their website for members of the community who suffer disabilities of one kind or another.

3. Bear in mind that disabilities can be temporary and may not even be physical.  This includes when people choose to use devices with small screens such as watches or telephones to view web content, temporary disabilities such as broken arms or lost glasses, situational limitations such as bright sunlight or an environment where audio could not be heard properly or those who have a slow Internet connection or limited/expensive bandwidth such as some 4G plans.

4. Make alterations to your wesbite (start with your media library) to ensure that you (at the least) include ALT-TEXT which will appear and can be machine read when a user hovers over that media in one of your posts or pages.

It’s also important that you validate your code when you write HTML and CSS. https://www.thesitewizard.com/webdesign/htmlvalidation.shtml has more information on this.