Features
what is accessibility?
Many people think of web accessibility as purely making websites....
Featured Site: http://www.redsound.com
www.redsound.com
Proof that design impacts on business performance
Quite often design projects can remain fairly low priority in a....
brandid at the house of commons!
In May, brandid were invited to attend a special event at the house....
what is accessibility?
Many people think of web accessibility as purely making websites....
Featured Site: http://www.redsound.com
www.redsound.com
Proof that design impacts on business performance
Quite often design projects can remain fairly low priority in a....
brandid at the house of commons!
In May, brandid were invited to attend a special event at the house....
what is accessibility?
Many people think of web accessibility as purely making websites available for blind or partially sighted users. Sometimes it is seen as a set of expensive features for a minority who will probably not make a contribution to the success of the site (via visits or purchases).
For brandid, an accessible website is not limited to this narrow definition, it takes in useability, meaning we create useable websites designed using world recognised Web Standards.
In reality everyone can benefit from an accessible website. There are several reasons for this:
- Usability is a method of improving your website's turnover - be that page impressions, stickiness, return visits or those all important purchases.
- One of the basic principles of building an accessible website is the separation of the content from the design. This allows us, where necessary to change the styling to suit a user’s need e.g. a user who is partially sighted or suffering from macular degeneration, can set the size of the text to be four times larger.
- If colour-blind, we can provide alternative styles with greater contrast in colours. Colour blindness affects about 12-20% of the white male population. This is an often overlooked disability, which can impact the understanding of tabulated data, navigation and even reading text. There are tools to help the colour perfect designer, such as http://vischeck.com/vischeck/vischeckURL.php which will render images and websites as if viewed by a colour blind person. Colours and contrast should also be used to try and make the navigation as obvious and simple as possible. This will help people with cognitive disorders as well. Also keeping any animations or flashing and moving text to a minimum will help with cognitive distractions as well as dyslexia.
- Accesskeys or keyboard shortcuts are used by blind and partially sighted users who cannot use a mouse, but also by people with motor or age related disorders who are unable to control a mouse with the required degree of accuracy. Also when “normal” users are aware of accesskeys they are often used for speed e.g the use of CTRL+S in most Windows™ applications can be used to save a document.
- As the page viewed only contains the actual content, and the style is separate, we can make that content available to multiple platforms, be it WebTV, PDAs, mobile phones, and of course web browsers.
But accessibility and useability is available to everyone, making the web an easier place to work and live.
Assistive Technologies
