A wonderful page for finding out more about accessibility is the W3C. There is so much information here it could keep you busy for weeks, if not months.
Accessibility is a very important issue to take into consideration these days. If you want anyone, with any disability or equipment to be able to view your site you, will need to take steps to ensure they are able to.
The W3C talks about the importance of creating One Web. They define this as: “One Web means making, as far as is reasonable, the same information and services available to users irrespective of the device they are using. However, it does not mean that exactly the same information is available in exactly the same representation across all devices. The context of mobile use, device capability variations, bandwidth issues and mobile network capabilities all affect the representation.”
They also talk about how many designers take into account the need to keep your site accessible by those who have disabilities, but not by people using mobile devices even though the challenges are very similar. For example, a user with a disability may be unable to use a mouse, and a web-enabled phone also may not have mouse (some have little roller mice, like the Blackberry). It would be wise to make your site navigable with a keyboard (or keypad) besides the mouse.
They also have an article Quick Tips to Make a Accessible Web Sites which has some very good and easy to understand information about things every designer should be doing to keep their site accessible.
There is Web Content Accessibility Guideline 1.0 that was established by the W3C in May 1999. They are currently working on WCAG 2.0, and hope to complete it this year. The W3C also has an extensive list of tools that you can use to help you make your site accessible.
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5 comments:
Nice points on hand held Web devices. Is the Blackberry a HTML only reader or is a full-on Web browser? I have never used one before, the screen looks way too small to see anything. You offer good parallelism between hand held devices and those with disabilities. I did forget about this point in my comment about "Accessibility."
The article about Quick Tips to Make an Accessible Web Site was very informative. There was ten tips on that page that offered examples, strategies, and markup examples which was very educational; although, it did take you back to the main page that, it appears, most of us have found on the W3C site.
Thank goodness for WC3. Can you imagine what it would be like if we didn’t have that site to assist designers. I do find it interesting to check out other sites and compare the information. It almost always comes back to the same information, just maybe worded a little different.
So much information to try and take in and then to try and put it all together and make it work and which tools are best to use. Even Adobe offers information on accessibility which is great, with the use of their Master Collection.
For me I have trouble reading the internet that is on cell phones. Way to small for me to read and probably always will be.
I'm really curious about hand held devices and how we plan for them. This a topic I think it would be worth our while to discuss. So far, in our books and class discussions we really haven't mentioned how our sites are viewed on hand held devices and what we need to know to keep them accessible on these devices. I'm glad that some people are brining it up.
Jason~ I am not sure about the Blackberry, my husband no longer has one. He did mention quite a few times that there was something he was trying to look at that wouldn't load. He had an older style though, the newer one might have been a lot better. I have a Palm PDA that goes on the internet, and several sites have a separate "mobile" style sheet that leaves out a lot of the graphics. If a site doesn't have the mobile settings, I usually can't see it properly.
Rachael~ I hope we do get to mobile devices in class. Most of the new phones have web browsers on them, it would be nice to know your site is viewable to them as well.
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