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An article on DeveloperFox brings up an important subject, one that most developers seem to forget. That subject is how do people with disabilities use your site?
We can collect all kinds of data for websites, like where people are coming from, what browser they are using, what operating system they are using, but one stat that we really can’t verify is how well does our site work for people with disabilities. So how can you design your site to allow these users to enjoy the site as much as those without disabilities?
One way is to have alternate versions of your site, or ways to modify your current version. CNN does a great job at this on their site. For people who have a partially blind, they added a feature to increase the font size of their site. This can be done with a little bit of JavaScript. The great thing is there are free versions of code which will allow you include this feature into your site.
The DeveloperFox article also talked about people who are color blind. When designing your site, think of colors which are not very similar to each other, especially if your site uses color for important parts of the site like navigation. Colourlovers.com has a great article about how some popular sites like Google and Twitter look to those who are color blind.
The next two disabilities are the oppoisite of each other, but with just a little extra work on a designers part, can be taken care of very easy. The first is blindness. The web, or a computer in general, takes on a completely different role for those who are blind. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has taken steps in both HTML and CSS to make for sure that they provide standards which benefit the blind also. In HTML, there are alt attributes, which can be used by screen readers, help to explain what the image is for those who can’t see the image. CSS even has built in ways to handle different types of equipment that the blind may use while visiting a website. Most designers may not have even heard of them but the are part of the media types which CSS supports. Aural handles information for speech synthesizers, like screen readers. There is also braille, which handles braille devices, and embosses for braile printers.
A great way to test your site to see how friendly it is to those who are blind, is to turn off your monitor or close your eyes, and use a screen reader. This will allow you to find flaws on your site, flaws that people without disabilities may not notice, like a video playing over top of a screen reader.
Deafness is a disability which a designer doesn’t think about. Most designers think of the web as a mix of text, and colors, but the web is starting to expand into a more media centered experience. With video sites like YouTube and Hulu becoming more popular, even smaller sites are starting to get into the video, podcast craze of the web. One suggestion is if you do have audio on your site, create a transcript of the audio. That way those who can’t hear will be able to get the information which they can not hear. Just like expericening your site as those who are blind, turn off the sound on your computer and try to understand what is happening on a video you never saw before. You can then see how much harder it is for those who can’t hear to get information from your site.
For those of use without disabilities it is hard to imagine designing and using the web without the senses that we rely on every day. A really good designer will keep those with disabilities in mind when creating a site. They will be able to make a site enjoyable for both those with and without disabilities.
Topics: CSS, Design, Web Development
