Is your site accessible?

Check out how easy it can be to make your site more accessible to people with disabilities - and be faster, as well!

The US government has, over the last few weeks, delivered compulsory guidelines to "official" Web sites that are aimed at making it easier for partially sighted and blind people to access content. To be honest, until the information arrived on my desktop, this wasn't something I'd paid an awful lot of attention to, even though one of the team's parents has, for years, been using aids like text-to-speech to help him in his PC usage. Even I change certain websites inside my browser, because I'm colour blind, and certain combinations are hell to read for me. But, as I say, it never occurred to me that there were things you could do to sort things out better - and, in the process, make your site quicker, more accessible to folks without disabilities, and, in all probability, better designed. How's that for a list of advantages?!!

Tables

The W3C has published a list of guidelines that is of enormous help here. I don't intend to reproduce their work verbatim - you can click here to go and grab a copy for yourself - but I'll just highlight some of the areas that will benefit the majority of Web authors - and Tables are the first thing on the list.

No matter which Web building package you use, tables are a nightmare. Unless you construct a table by hand, cell by cell, and populate it as you go, you can guarantee that the definition lines and the content are far from sequential. Our own Main Menu page is built largely with tables, and, if you have a look at the source, you'll see that what's in the HTML code bears little resemblance to the order in which you see things in your browser. And entry at the top - today's update - may well be buried somewhere in the middle of the source code, so someone using speech synthesis to read the page would not "see" today's update in the "read" of the top line of the table - that would happen somewhere further on, if you see what I mean.

What the W3C suggests is that you use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to format the page, using logically laid out text as the basis. That means that if you were to read the text in isolation, away from the browser, you'd be able to make sense of it (and looking at the source for our own previous front page, there's no way you could do that in its then current form).

Applying CSS styles, which include positioning commands, you can then lay the page out more prettily. The upside of this for normally sighted readers is that the page, having lost the gubbins that goes with tables, loads much more quickly, since the CSS stuff can be defined externally to the page, and needs only to be downloaded the once for the whole site.

Now, the advantage to that is obvious, I would have thought. If, in the source, you can substitute:

<td valign="top"> <p align="right" style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><b><strong><font face="Verdana" color="#CC3300" size="2"><i>hardware review</i></font></strong></b></p>

with:

<p class: review_head> hardware review </p>

your page is going to be smaller, quicker to load, and thus more attractive. IF your pages are as busy as ours, there's a hell of a saving to be made in reduced source verbiage, resulting in pages which download to the reader much more quickly. That's CSS for you!

Menuing

Next on the list is menuing. I've noticed myself that form is frequently held over function on the Web, and designers have this habit of deciding that the fonts they can work with don't fit into the "look" of a site. So, they "graphicalise" fonts for their menus - use a font that you may well not have on your PC to create a graphic, and then use the image instead of text in a menu. As far as anyone with sight problems is concerned, that's a complete no-no. For instance, I cannot distinguish between blue and green - I get horribly confused between them, so I have absolutely no blue trousers (that I know of) other than denim jeans, and absolutely no green shirts. That means I don't look a complete wally if my beloved isn't around when I decide what to wear (and it's why I usually wear black - it's hard to mistake black, especially teamed with white).

There's a site which insists on using a graphical menu, using, obviously, blue on green (or green on blue - I have no idea) in images on the menu bar. I can see a block of colour, but I can't distinguish the text from the background. I have to wait until the alt text shows itself before I know where the link points to, which makes the site very slow for me to use. Consequently, I just don't go there any more unless there's no alternative.

If, on the other hand, they'd used text in their menus, I'd have been able to apply my own style sheet to the site, and chosen colours that I could see clearly - and, as a by-product, their site would load more quickly too.

Graphics

And, finally for this article, graphics. Frankly, a website without graphics is, usually, pretty bland, rarely pretty and generally not highly visited unless its information is scintillating. You do need some graphical content on a site. For those folks with sight problems, though, a picture is, generally, not worth a thousand words. Therefore, there has to be some textual explanation of what the graphic shows, just so, if you like, the reader can partake in the same experience as a sighted reader. The document I've linked to above goes into techniques for sorting this at some length - I'd advise you to read it.

Conclusion

I don't for one moment think that it's going to be compulsory for all Web sites worldwide to adhere to the US government's guidelines, but I do think that more and more pressure will be brought to bear on high profile sites to conform more closely to the techniques the W3C describes. At the end of the day, if it results in sites that are quicker to load, easier to navigate, and include more people in their audience, then these new guidelines are no bad thing. If, as a by-product, the guidelines actually make developing a site easier and quicker (and believe me, CSS does exactly that), then that's a bonus well worth having. As you'll have seen, almost every technique I've mentioned (and this just scratches the surface) results in a speedier site. It has to be a good thing!

 

David Dorn