Understanding Disabilities when Designing a Website

With 75% of the US population and 65% of the UK population having internet access at home, it is very important that website design supports both accessibilty and usability. The WCAG Guidelines from 1999 can help web developers to design accessible websites. But webdesigners and developers should look further than the guidelines if they want to create websites that are useful to users with disabilities.

For those unfamiliar with accessibility issues pertaining to Web page design, consider that many users may be operating in contexts very different from your own:

They may not be able to see, hear, move, or may not be able to process some types of information easily or at all.

Different Difficulties to consider

1. Some users may have difficulty reading or comprehending text.
2. Some users may not have or be able to use a keyboard or mouse.
3. Some users may have a text-only screen, a small screen, or a slow Internet connection.
4. Some users may not speak or understand fluently the language in which the document is written.
5. Some users may be in a situation where their eyes, ears, or hands are busy or interfered with (e.g., driving to work, working in a loud environment, etc.).
6. Some users may have an early version of a browser, a different browser entirely, a voice browser, or a different operating system.

Choice of a different font design can make a change

Authors creating content should consider these different situations when designing a website. By implementing just one accessible design choice several disability groups usually benefit at once and the web community as a whole. HTML authors will have more control over their pages, using style sheets to control font styles and eliminatw the FONT element. To make pages more accessible to people with low vision by sharing the style sheets, will often shorten page download times for all users.

Alternative ways to present content

Content meaning text here can be presented as synthesized speech, braille or visually-displayed text. These three mechanisms each use a different sense — ears for synthesized speech, tactile for braille, and eyes for visually-displayed text. Bit in order to be useful, the text must convey the same message or function as the image. For example, consider a text equivalent for a photographic image of the Earth as seen from outer space. If the purpose of the image is mostly that of decoration, then the text “Photograph of the Earth as seen from outer space” might fulfill the necessary function. If the purpose of the photograph is to illustrate specific information about world geography, then the text equivalent should convey that information. If the photograph has been designed to tell the user to select the image (e.g., by clicking on it) for information about the earth, equivalent text would be “Information about the Earth”. Thus, if the text conveys the same function or purpose for the user with a disability as the image does for other users, then it can be considered a text equivalent. Note that, in addition to benefitting users with disabilities, text equivalents can help all users find pages more quickly, since search robots can use the text when indexing the pages.

This article is an adaptation of the following guidelines.