Chapter 6. Designing for Accessibility
| You're a designer. A visually oriented person. And the Web is such a graphic medium, it's easy to forget that not everyone browsing the Web uses his or her eyes. However, the Web is a worldwide community of all types of people, including those with disabilities. The visually impaired want to visit your site. So do people with cognitive or learning disabilities. If these people showed up at your front door, you wouldn't dream of insulting them or making their visit unpleasant. Likewise, when you're building your Web site, you should consider their special situations. Designing for accessibility is about making your Web site's content available to everyone, regardless of disability. The Web isn't the only place where accessibility is important. In fact, the Web is one of the last places to consider accessibility issues. Public buildings need ramps and elevators to provide easy access for the physically impaired. Parking lots set aside the best spots for the handicapped. Movie theaters provide special seats and rows that are easier for wheelchairs. Television goes out with closed captioning for those hard of hearing. It wasn't until the late 1990s that computer people began thinking in the same terms. Now, in the United States and many other countries, accessibility is a matter of law. It's illegal for the U.S. government to award contracts to technology suppliersincluding Web builderswhose products don't follow accessibility guidelines. No one's going to drag you off to the Federal penitentiary if you don't build an accessible Web site. You just won't be able to get on the gravy train and charge the U.S. taxpayers seven thousand dollars per link.
Just mentioning the word accessibility in casual conversation is enough to cause some designers distress, but making a Web site accessible isn't really that difficult. You don't have to develop a way to beam images directly into the brains of the visually impaired. You don't have to try to give everyone the exact same experience of your site. You just have to provide an equivalent experience. That is, you provide information on your site in such a way that people with disabilities have the same level of access as people without. Your disabled visitors will even meet you halfway. They have special software and hardware on their computers such as screen readers, text-to-speech converters, and text-to-Braille converters. All you have to do is present your content so that these devices can find it and work with it.
Plain text is the currency of the realm. It's the raw material that accessibility tools search out and convert. Therefore, in building for accessibility, you want to give corresponding text for every nontextual bit of content on your site. This is the concept of text equivalents. The idea behind it is, if you can describe in words the portions of your site that are purely visual (like your images), you give people with disabilities an equivalent experience of your site's content. It's a different experience, yes, but that's all right. The disabled should come away with the same information that everyone else does, whether they get it by looking at a picture or listening to a textual description of that picture. |
