Access all areas

• Article 5 of 26
• M-iD, February 2004

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For web users with disabilities - for whom online access to services might improve their quality of life considerably - the web is impenetrable territory. In fact, surveys conducted by web usability specialist Nielsen Norman Group indicate that, for disabled users, many web sites are up to three times harder to use.

The operators of these sites, when shown the problems that they pose for disabled users, argue that, while it would be preferable to make them more accessible, it is either too difficult or expensive to do so - or simply not a priority.

Those organisations may be surprised to hear that their web sites may be breaking the law, laying them open to bad publicity or even prosecution and fines. Yet with a little thought and advice, they could remove those barriers and end up with extremely loyal users, a web site accessible by a far greater range of devices than just PCs, and reduced maintenance costs for their sites.

Alternative choice
Often, the problems that a web user with disabilities faces stem from the construction of the page rather than its content. A user with sight problems, for example, can access a web site with a screen reader, a program that reads out the text on the screen while providing some idea of how it has been formatted. Braille screens are also available. However, users will have no idea what information a picture is trying to convey unless some kind of description of it is provided.

Hypertext markup language (HTML) provides web designers with this facility: every image can have 'ALT(ernative)' text that screen readers will read out. However, even though virtually every web design tool in the world supports ALT text - and the latest versions of HTML mandate its use for all images - many web designers do not provide ALT text for pictures.

The result is that an important home page graphic that conveys the organisation's beliefs, explains the navigation options of the site, and lists the services it provides and where they can be found, is presented as just one word: Image.

Users with sight problems are not the only group that finds certain web sites hard to use. Five per cent of men are colour blind and may find it hard to understand information when colour is the only differentiator, for example. Long or complex text can present challenges for deaf users whose first language is signing, people with learning difficulties, and those with dyslexia. Elderly web surfers may have problems manipulating a mouse with sufficient dexterity and reading smaller text. People with physical handicaps and spatial awareness problems can use a range of different tools in place of a mouse and keyboard to control a computer but may find it hard to navigate through many links or select them, particularly if the links are close together. Epileptics may have severe reactions to pages that have blinking graphics or text.

Leaving aside the legal implications of a web site that cannot be used by such users (see box, Legal requirements), there are major benefits to making web sites accessible.

“The best reason to make a web site accessible is to acquire a group of very loyal customers,” says Jakob Nielsen, principal at web sign consultancy the Nielsen Norman Group. “Users with disabilities generally get quite poorly treated on the web. If your web site doesn't treat them badly, that's the one they'll use. And people communicate: if a company discriminates against someone, 10 other people will hear about it; if it doesn't, 10 other people will hear about that too.”

Jason Taylor of Usablenet, a company specialising in making web sites accessible to the disabled, agrees. “Disabled users will stay very loyal to a site that is accessible, if only because they've gone through the pain of trying to find a site that works, something that can take a long time,” he says.

Device drivers
Another benefit of coding a site to make it accessible, adds Taylor, is that it often results in an interface that is usable by a far wider range of devices - not just the 'assisted device' that a disabled user might use.

“When you talk about PDAs [personal digital assistants], for example, they're quite strongly allied to the type of support available in an assisted device for accessing the web,” he explains. “They support only text, use URLs based in HTML, and don't support JavaScript or Flash.”

So if a site is usable for a mobile device with a stripped-down web browser and small display, it is probably accessible to the disabled, and vice versa.

Cascading style sheets (CSS), often used to ensure a group of web pages all use the same fonts and colours, are a powerful tool for changing how content appears on different devices. “The main thing is that they separate the content from the layout and make it easier for assisted devices to understand what's going on,” explains Taylor.

Instead of marking up a web page to make its content appear in a particular way, a web designer using CSS can keep the content in the web page while leaving the information on its presentation in a separate style sheet.

Different style sheets, moreover, can be specified for different situations - a screen reader, web browser, mobile phone or printer can each have a different style sheet that will format the page and hide or reveal content appropriately - so a single page can appear radically different to different users without having to be rewritten. And since style sheets only have to be downloaded once, they can even reduce server load as the formatting that used to be embedded in every web page now only appears in the style sheet.

The developers of the major web page design tools have been working hard to incorporate CSS support into their programs over the last few years. “Two or three years ago, we realised there was a significant opportunity - and requirement - to support people with disabilities,” says Macromedia's UK MD Fiona Coughlan. “If you look at the legislation coming into Europe and the UK, it's some of the most stringent possible in terms of deploying web sites to customers.”

With each successive release of Dreamweaver, Macromedia's flagship web design tool, CSS support has been increased and accessibility features enhanced, claims Coughlan. Macromedia has licensed some of Usablenet's software so that it can not only go through a web site highlighting colours that would be difficult for some users to perceive, and identifying which fonts should be used and so on, it will also educate designers about aspects of design that will make it easier or harder for disabled users to access the site.

Perfect accessibility
Other tools are making it easier to serve accessible content for an entire site. A content management system, when used correctly, should simply be able to pass content into accessible web page templates. “If each page is coded individually,” points out Nielsen, “there are 10,000 opportunities for a designer to code wrongly. With a CMS, you only have to get it right once.”

Fortunately, says Nielsen, it is not usually the case that organisations have to spend considerable money on a 'big bang' project to maximise their web sites' accessibility. “To make a web site perfectly accessible is difficult. But it's not a choice of perfection or nothing - if it were that choice, most companies would choose nothing. There is a third choice: to make it more accessible, which is easy,” he says.

Whether changes are small-scale or wide-ranging, any improvement to accessibility will make the lives of many web users with disabilities easier. With all the additional benefits accessibility brings, it should be a priority for any web design team. And with all the legal implications inaccessibility brings, it should be a priority for any information manager.

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