Accessible Design and particular Impairments
excerpt taken from http://wired.com/news/ebiz/0,1272,45306,00.html While many users find pop-ups to be simply annoying, there are some for whom pop-up ads cause even more serious headaches. Jim Allen, webmaster and statewide technical support specialist for the Texas School of the Blind and Visually Impaired, said these programs make a big difference for the people he works with. He's been suggesting Pop-Up Stopper to his blind Web surfers who use screen-reading software. The problem is that when a pop-up ad comes up, the screen reader jumps to it and starts reading that instead. "You don't have a back button because there[not equal]s nothing to go back to and sometimes they don't have a close button either, so (blind users) have to get reoriented to where they are," Allen said. "It's analogous to watching a TV and someone else is playing with the remote control. Suddenly you don't know where you are and you have to wrestle with them to get control back to what you were watching." "We've had e-mails from attention deficit disorder and visually impaired people who haven' t been able to use the Web recently and say that with our Ad Subtract software they can now go back online," interMute's English said. Allen and others who work with the blind are creating a set of guidelines in association with the World Wide Web Consortium, which may offer a feature to stop pop-up advertising. They[not equal]ve received input from companies including Microsoft and hope these guidelines will be implemented on the browser end. - -- Alex Piner apiner@onebox.com - email (310) 309-3500 x2941 - voicemail/fax (above taken from W3c mailing list) "2.3 Accessibility Factors for Other Disabilities The Access Guidelines presented here emphasize the access to the Web for visually impaired persons. However a number of accessibility guidelines and features present benefits for users with other disabilities that may be aural, cognitive or physical. To take one example, the [OE]D[^]tag[base '] technique of including alternative text descriptions for graphical information can also be used to increase accessibility for deaf WWW users. [OE]D[^]tags[base '] can also be used to present a text[^]based description of an audio clip, which would otherwise be completely inaccessible to deaf users. Buttons are regularly used in many sites as an alternative to simple text links. Buttons not only enhance the look of a page but they are also helpful to people with motor disabilities because they offer a larger target for clicking a pointer. By being clear and consistently placed they may have benefits for the cognitively impaired. However, sites which use buttons by themselves are a problem for persons with visual disabilities and so a suitable ALT[^]text should also be included. This point again highlights the fact that visual cues and graphics do not need to be removed from Web pages in order to make them accessible - they just need to have suitable textual equivalents if critical to the navigation and understanding of the Web site. One group of impaired persons that remains difficult to reach are the mentally disabled people. Although only simplification of web pages can lead to better understanding by this group, an uncluttered web page (as produced by text only browsers) might help them to distinguish main items from unimportant ones." http://www.stakes.fi/cost219/webdesign.htm#2.3%20Accessibility%20Factors%20for%20Other%20Disabilities Designing for peple with learning difficulties/cognitive disabilities http://www.otal.umd.edu/UUPractice/cognition/ MAKING THE WEB ACCESSIBLE FOR THE DEAF, HEARING AND MOBILITY IMPAIRED by Mike Paciello, Executive Director, Yuri Rubinsky Insight Foundation, http://www.yuri.org http://www.samizdat.com/pac2.html Links: Free Web reader: http://www.ldpride.net/helpread.htm Learning disability pride http://www.ldpride.net/ LDOnline: http://www.ldonline.org/ links: http://www.fln.vcu.edu/ld/ld.html Education and disability: http://www.fln.vcu.edu/ld/ld.html Simply Web talking browser: http://www.econointl.com/sw/ A Free Talking Web Browser: Simply Web 2000 is an speech friendly, speech enabled accessible web browser with advance features that allow easy navigation of complex pages by blind users. It uses Internet Explorer 4.01 or later as it's engine. We recommend installing Explorer 5.0 for optimal performance and flexibility. http://www.talkingsites.com/faqs.html Talking Web pages