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Understanding Web Accessibility

I recently found one of the best descriptions of what accessibility is I've ever read. I haven't had a chance to track down the book yet, but if this chapter is an example, it's a must have for anyone in web design.

Web accessibility is about removing those barriers so that people with disabilities can use and contribute to the Web. - Understanding Web Accessibility

Go read the whole chapter, it's well worth your time.

Posted on Thursday July 30, 2009
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What's Your Feed?

You have your site setup properly, a beautiful design, perfect content... that's everything right? Do you have RSS feeds? Can people subscribe to your site? Quick, off the top of your head, what's your site's feed called? Do you know? What's the feeds URL? Is it available from any page in the site, or just the home page? Do you have multiple feeds? If so, where are they available from? Here are a few things you can do to make it easier for your users to subscribe to your site.

  • Make sure your RSS feeds have easily identifiable names. This is configurable in a lot of content management systems (CMS).  "News" might make sense to you, but when your subscriber has multiple feeds they won't know who's "news" is whose. For a single feed I would suggest the site name. For multiple feed sites, I'd suggest the site name and an individual identifier like "site name - news" or "site name - blog".
  • Make sure your feeds are easily available. If a site has a feed, but it can't be found, it's not benefiting you. It might makes sense to make the news feed accessible from the news page, and the blog feed from the blog. That's a reasonable organization. You might however, want to also make them all available from one unified location. I'd suggest the home page,  or a dedicated subscriptions page if you have a number of feeds available.
  • Do your feeds work? Subscribe to all of your feeds, and check them regularly. Make sure that they work, and they display your content as expected. A surprising number of RSS feeds I see don't display properly, or have errors that don't allow them to be viewed at all.

Don't overlook the details of your site. It can be a little thing like a malfunctioning or poorly named RSS feed that keeps your from that one important contact you needed.

Posted on Wednesday July 29, 2009
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The Ironically Named Usability.gov

You might expect a high level of accessibility from a site called Usability.gov.  You might be disappointed. Sadly, I wasn't particularly surprised by my quick look into the accessibility of this site.

Usability.gov

Age is definitely a factor. While the copyright is up to date, the fact that has custom style sheets for Internet Explorer (IE) 5 and newer, and 4.7 and older makes me think it's not a new design. With that code, I'd hope it was more than five years old. Regardless, it's showing its age.

Some of the low points of the site are:

  • Absolutely horrible use of headings for structure.
  • Use of images of text rather than text.
  • Bad use of the hover pseudo-class making navigation awkward
  • No use of the focus pseudo-class making  keyboard navigation all but impossible
  • An unreasonable number of validation errors and warnings
  • Invisible skip links, which don't work in IE.

This is one of those sites that seems to pass most cursory accessibility tests without actually being accessible. It follows the letter of Section 508 compliance, while throwing the spirit of the law out the window. That it does have skip links, but you can't see them and they don't work is a perfect example of this. It has the appearance of accessibility, without actual the benefit of accessibility.

Posted on Wednesday July 08, 2009
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Accessibility - IT Dashboard

A friend recently asked me about the accessibility of a new US government website he'd seen. He knew I'd been following the various discussions about federal government accessibility. Like others I've looked at, IT Dashboard doesn't do very well.

IT Dashboard

At first glance, you might think it was going to be accessible. Nice clean layout in a modern style... it should be accessible too, right? You might think that, but you'd be disappointed. Let's take it from the top.

  • First thing I noticed while testing is that it seems to be forcing compatibility mode in Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) As of this posting it's not yet on the IE8 Compatibility View Blacklist
  • Skip links: present, but invisible and don't work for me in Internet Explorer 8. (compatibility mode?)
  • Text resizing: Nice clean text resizing links at the top of the page, but they don't seem to work in Internet Explorer or Firefox. I can see a refreshing of the screen, but I can't see any text changing.
  • Page headings: Should have at least one H1 heading. It has none. The home page has one H2 heading.
  • Default language: not defined
  • Alternative text: Purely decorative images are given alt text, they should be put in the CSS.
  • OnClick handler does not have focus-able element
  • Color contrast: with a 4.5:1 ratio being a minimum value for AA rating this site has links with a 2.35:1 ratio. Unacceptable.
  • Screen refreshing: There is no means that I can see to stop the screen from refreshing whenever the home page graphs reload. While this isn't particularly noticeable in normal browser viewing, my testing software resets about every thirty seconds. I have to think that accessibility software and add-ons would do the same.

While this is by no means a complete evaluation, it does show an alarming number of problems, some of them quite serious. My final problem with this site is the accessibility page. In my opinion this is the place where you explain how to use the accessibility features of a website. This is not the place to make political statements. This site's page begins with:

The Obama Administration has a comprehensive agenda to empower individuals with disabilities in order to equalize opportunities for all Americans.

It's only in the eighth paragraph that actual web accessibility features are mentioned. These three sentences are two little, and they are seven paragraphs too late. This is as good a summation of my opinion of the site as I could write.

Posted on Saturday July 04, 2009
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Why Accessibility?

Who cares about accessibility? The short answer is you should. If you don't, you're not alone. A lot of people don't give a lot of thought to accessibility, but they should too. Why should you worry about accessibility? For this discussion, let's leave the legal implications out entirely, they're important too, but that's another discussion. Let's just consider your audience. Who is your audience? Do you like your audience? How would you feel if I told you I was going to take some of them away? Lack of accessibility might be doing just that.

  • Low color contrast? You could be losing the one in twelve adults that are color blind.
  • No alt text? you're losing anyone who is visually impaired or has images turned off for bandwidth reasons.
  • No captioning of audio? You've now lost anyone who has difficulty hearing.
  • Didn't bother making keyboard navigation possible? You've lost anyone with manual dexterity problems, as well as people using some types of accessibility software.

I could go on. Each type of accessibility you ignore, is a portion of your audience that you aren't reaching. You'd never consider ignoring clients you talk to in person, but you're doing just that to your potential online clients.  Why accessibility? Because if you make your site accessible, you reach all of your audience.

Posted on Wednesday July 01, 2009
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