Hi Mike,
Please forgive me if I am being repetitive as I have not read all of the
replies to your question.
I have worked in commonwealth government for several years, so can only
give you a perspective from that angle. All commonwealth and State
Government departments must now comply with the National Transition
Strategy which was released by AGIMO in June 2010 (available from the AGIMO
site). Most Government agencies have teams working on becoming compliant
with the Strategy.
That I am aware of, the ATO, Immigration and Centrelink have had Usability
centres, labs and Accessibility teams for many years not only to enable
ease of use of their web sites and web applications by people using
assistive software - both internally (employees) and externally (clients) -
but making them generally more usable to all members of the community and
staff.
Regards, Karen Conyers
"Mike Kear"
<wsg@afpwebworks.
com> To
Sent by: <[email protected]>
lists@webstandard cc
sgroup.org
Subject
RE: [WSG] How do you cater to
23/08/2011 05:53 users with disabilities?
PM Protective Mark
Please respond to
wsg@webstandardsg
roup.org
The conclusion I am coming to, with 5 days since I asked this and no-one
actually saying they do ANYTHING to cater for people with disabilities, is
that even after all this time, no one really spends much time thinking
about
users with special needs, other than to code to standards and hope that
does
the trick.
No one either agreed or disagreed with the proposition that sticking to
standards IS in fact enough.
I asked this question, wondering if someone would say 'yes we have a
usability lab' or 'we have a consultant who runs our sites through his
screen reader for us' or 'we have meetings before launch specifically to
discuss' or something. But no one has said they do anything at all for
users with disability.
The only responses I've had to this question are people referring me to
documents on line that I found long ago with google. I was interested
that
none of the people who gave me those URLS (except Josh Street) said they
actually used the advice in the documents themselves. Josh wasn't
specific
about how he caters to people with special needs, but seems to speak with
some knowledge so I'm assuming he caters to Dyslexics in his designs.
I guess it's going to take another law suit like that one against the
Olympics2000 site to get anyone to take users with special needs seriously
and actually lift a finger to cater to their needs.
The conclusion I'm being forced towards is that developers are basically
saying that users with special needs will have to swim for themselves and
it's up to them to find some software of their own to get around all the
obstacles the A/Bs put in their way. I'm glad at least property
developers
have been forced to change that attitude.
Cheers
Mike Kear
Windsor, NSW, Australia
Adobe Certified Advanced ColdFusion Developer
AFP Webworks
http://afpwebworks.com
ColdFusion 9 Enterprise, PHP, ASP, ASP.NET hosting from AUD$15/month
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On
Behalf Of Mike Kear
Sent: Thursday, 18 August 2011 11:12 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [WSG] How do you cater to users with disabilities?
How to the rest of you a/b people (i.e. able bodied) cater to users with
various forms of disability?
Up until recently, I've tended to rely on keeping my code to standards,
eliminating tables except for their proper purpose of tabulating data, and
hoping that will give the accessibility level required. Do you go to the
step of accessing your sites with JAWS or something similar to see how the
site works for users with screen readers?
I remember in the 1990s when I was working at Australian Consumers
Association (choice.com.au) we had someone come and bring his PC with
JAWS.
The web team all sat in the boardroom getting ever more glum looks on our
faces as we saw to our horror how terrible our new design was for this poor
guy. We thought we'd got a terrific new design, and were about to launch
it, when he did this demo for us. We had to go back and recode
everything.
This was before anyone was talking about standards though - it was back
when
the normally accepted method of laying out pages was to use tables, and
buttons were nearly always images. I remember being astounded at how fast
he was moving around the page, even though we'd unwittingly designed an
obstacle course of humungous proportions for him.
Our anguish at the time resulted in a far better web site, and convinced me
to pay attention to standards and accessibility ever since.
But now I'm wondering if simply sticking to standards is enough?
What do you all think? Do you include JAWS in your site testing?
Cheers
Mike Kear
Windsor, NSW, Australia
Adobe Certified Advanced ColdFusion Developer
AFP Webworks
http://afpwebworks.com
ColdFusion 9 Enterprise, PHP, ASP, ASP.NET hosting from AUD$15/month
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