First of all, I should address that the heading of this Katigori blog entry is potentially mind-boggling and vast. As a result, I am focusing on a few areas for now.
Accessibility is one of my areas of responsibility at work. When I think of it, I have to remember that it is in my clients’ best interests that their website is as accessible as we can make it, while balancing the delicate timescale with development. Indeed, quite often for developers not very interested or concerned with considering the variety of users, accessibility is a five minute job at the end where they check it in a few different browsers, and ignore the fact it only works in their beloved Firefox.
That’s not what its about. Accessibility is Disability Compliance. If you imagined your shop front door was up a flight of five steps, and someone elderly, or unable to walk, or blind came to your shop, you could hardly let those five stairs prevent a potential customer shopping, could you? No, it wouldn’t make sense, and it would be downright rude. Then why, equally, create a website with grey text on grey background, or with insanely small text? Aha, you’re thinking – they can always use their browser to make the font bigger.
Well, narrowminded, not everyone is a computer whizz, and what’s inaccessible comes hand in hand with poor design. Even me, who doesn’t wear glasses, absolutely hates tiny tiny text, or poor contrast. Its a strain, and I don’t want to revisit or spend more than two seconds on your site because of it. Users have little time, little patience, and you’ve just automatically wiped out your users with difficulties and a high proportion of other potential users. Applause for you.
Accessibility is something the developer really should be considering at the base design phase. Its a matter of education. If it becomes habit, as much as putting a semi-colon delimiter in your css, you’re on a roll, and hey, guess what, really simple things like putting labels on your form fields really make a difference. Here’s a little pseudo-code like example.
What this does is 1) allow you to click on the label and then type directly into the input and 2) links label and input together to make sense for screen readers etc. Point 1 is actually very handy for normal users. I often click on the words instead of the box. For the sake of setting an ID for your inputs and wrapping your labels, it only takes what, twenty more keystrokes. Having the extra label tag can also be handy in CSS referencing.
In a professional capacity, we don’t want to be building five steps up to the door of our client’s shop, do we? No, because it is increasingly likely we’ll get caught out as legislation changes. Keep ahead of the times.
Further Reading:
BBC: New guidelines boost web access
WAVE accessibility tool – run your webpage through it for an analysis
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines