digital media access group
...excellent accessibility research and consultancy
Better Design
Research has shown that by designing an interface accessible to people with disabilities, you make it more accessible to all users.
Designing for all users in all situations
- The School of Computing here at the University of Dundee has pioneered the principle that "designing for extra-ordinary users in ordinary environments is the same as designing for ordinary users in extra-ordinary environments"
- Putting this in a web site design context, this means that if you design for a disabled user, you are likely to produce an interface which is accessible and usable to a non-disabled user working with non-standard browsing equipment, using non-standard hardware (i.e. something other than a PC with at least a 15 inch monitor).
Using Valid HTML
- The assistive technologies used by disabled users (such as screen readers linked to browsers) rely on valid HTML in order to work correctly.
- So any non-valid code is likely to cause problems in the interpretation of the page, and hence the user is unlikely to receive in the correct format the information contained on the page.
- Making sure your HTML is valid goes a long way to make your pages accessible. The group who oversee and develop web technologies and standards, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), can check your code on-line at the W3C HTML Validator.
W3C Guidelines
To help web designers produce accessible material, the W3C have created the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), culminating in a set of guidelines known as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These guidelines have corresponding checkpoints which can be used by developers during site design. The checkpoints are prioritised into three groups in order of importance:
- Priority 1 Checkpoints must be followed, otherwise some users will not be able to access the page
- Priority 2 Checkpoints should be followed, otherwise some users will have extreme difficulty in accessing the page
- Priority 3 Checkpoints may be followed, otherwise some users will have some difficulty in accessing the page
Using these guidelines helps prioritising work required to raise the accessibility level of a web site.
Useful W3C links: