Scottish Arts Marketers' Forum: accessible web design
Added on Wednesday 12 Nov 2003
Last Thursday I lead a 'round table discussion session' on accessible web design for the Scottish Arts Council Marketers' Forum. It was an enjoyable experience - here are some of the issues that came up and brief versions of my answers.
How do blind people surf the web? What should we be aware off when designing for someone who is blind?
Many blind people, and people with low vision use a 'screen reader' which 'reads out' (i.e. turns into audio) the text on a web page. This has implications for making a site accessible to someone who is blind:
Pictures can't be 'read' - so labels have to be added to the pictures to indicate their purpose or the content they contain. There also needs to be alternative ways to access the information contained in all non-text elements such as videos, or animations, e.g. a transcript or captions could be provided along with a video.
Having information read out - is a 'linear' experience - generally screen readers will start to read from the top left of the page and work their way down. Depending on how the site is designed it can either be a long and tedious experience, or one that is a pleasure to a blind person because it either ignores or takes into account how screen readers work. For example, if the first section on each web page is the navigation bar, and the navigation contains 100 links, then the screen reader has to read out those 100 links before getting to the content of the page. There are many ways of getting around this problem; one would be to put the content first on the page and the navigation second, another would be to provide a way of 'jumping over' the navigation bar straight to the content.
The arts community needs aesthetically pleasing websites - do accessible websites need to be just text and therefore look boring?
The idea that accessible websites need to be text-only is a myth; most of the changes required to make a website accessible do not affect the visual appearance of the site.
Whether the site is aesthetically pleasing or not, is not related to how accessible it is - it is related to the talents of the web designer, and how well the designer and the client have thought about the goals of the site. An awareness of accessibility issues can however lead to changes that improve the usability of the site for everyone.
For many people a site which contains pictures, animations, sound and video will be more accessible than one that contains only text. Using different communication mediums means offering more choice to the visitor to the site - and that can only be a good thing. Well designer, good looking websites, that make good use of multimedia technologies offer a richer experience to the visitor - however as mentioned earlier provide alternative ways of accessing information within non-text content.
Mostly arts related organisations do not have a lot of money - is it more expensive to build an accessible web design?
I am not aware of any research that shows whether or not it is more expensive to build an accessible website. Testimony be web design experts during the legal proceedings in Australia (when an individual took the Olympic Organising Committe to court because their site was not accessible), estimated that the cost of building an accessible website adds 2% to the budget of the site.
In the medium to longer term the support costs for an accessible website are lower. For one thing, there will be less e-mails and support calls from people who can't access the information on your site. Creating an accessible website helps the designer to think about important aspects of the site such as how the content of pages are structured, and how logically the navigation of the site is organised; getting these aspects right early in the design process will make the site easier and cheaper (certainly in terms of time) to manage in the long term.
Some aspects of making a site accessible will be expensive if they requires specialist knowledge, such as adding captions to video, or creating content in several languages. Making a site accessible 'retrospectively' tends to be more expensive than creating an accessible website from scratch.
We don't want to discriminate against people with colour blindness, are there any colours should be avoided?
First, ensure that you don't design your site in a way that means visitors cannot change the colours to suite their own needs. Second be aware that 15% of men have some form of colour blindness (only .4% of women); the most common combinations of colours that can cause problems are red/green (remember red berries on a tree with green leaves) and yellow/blue (remember the swedish flag or yellow daffodils against a blue sky). Using these colours on their own is generally not a problem, it is only when they are used as in conjunction with one another that problems of contrast occur, e.g. red text on a green backgound; both may look like grey to someone who has colour blindness.