Michael, put simply this a very important and illuminating email. I, like
many people, am fortunate enough to have my sight. As we are all consumed
in the day to day rigors of surviving in difficult times it is easy to
ignore deviations like making sure those without sight can get around on the
web. Even if it costs time and money to do this, I personally believe those
who take the time to care will find reward.
Kind Regards - Mike Brunt
Macromedia Consulting
-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Kear
To: CF-Talk
Sent: 6/3/01 11:43 PM
Subject: Your site's easy to navigate? You Think so?
I have just come out of a most enlightening session with a blind user,
running though a client's web site with JAWS, a screen reading program
that turns the web page into synthesised voice.
I thought I was quite aware of accessibility issues before, and was
comfortable in thinking that my sites were better than the average in
providing access to the blind and people with other disabilities. This
session was educational to say the least.
I am still convinced my sites are better than average, but I am bound to
inform you that the average is pretty damn poor. I know some people
are
really concerned about accessibility for the disabled and others have
decided that the disabled are such a small portion of their userbase,
it's
not worth changing everything to allow for them.
I'm here to tell you that it's not difficult to design a good site to
allow for access, it just takes a little understanding of how programs
like JAWS works. To be truthful, I think that if I were blind, I'd go
stark raving mad at all the frustrations of life but trying to surf the
web wouldn't make life any easier that's for sure.
For example, he took us through a page of our bookshop. And we'd
arranged things to look nice on the page, but there were parts of the
catalogue page where he didn't know what the "add to basket" graphic was
referring to - this book or the previous one. And some nested tables
were simply awful and impossible to work round. We all think putting
navigation buttons on the top of every page makes for easy navigation,
but
blind people have to wade through (in our case) 50 navigation links
before
getting to the guts of the page. On a search of our site, the resulting
page has a nice header at the top with links to all our site's
catgegories
and sub-categories and then a sidebar with links to other parts of the
site, and finally the search results itself. Visually it looks fine -
quick and simple to move around the site. But using the screen reading
software it took **AGES** to get to anything related to the search. By
just laying out the page differently, we could have made this page FAR
easier to navigate for him.
I'm not suggesting we should all go about redesigning our sites just for
the relatively few blind users, but just understanding how the software
works, has made me re-think many of the forms I build. The user also
said that Government sites tended to be the worst of all. I'm not sure
if
that's because they're designed by developers with an eye on the
government money or because they are specified by bureaucrats.
Certainly
of all the sites that ought to know about accessibility, Government
sites
ought to be the leaders, and apparently they aren't.
I think as web developers, you'd all be doing A Good Thing if you
arranged
for a meeting like we just had at Australian Consumers Association -
have
a blind person come and work your site for you using their screen
reading
software. At the risk of being accused of making an off-colour joke,
it's
a real eye-opener.
Cheers,
Mike Kear
AFP Webworks,
Windsor, NSW, Australia.
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