Designing for Accessibility
As members of a community, it is important to remember that there are Internet users who may have special requirements to access our information.
It's the Internet... did you think everyone could access the information?
Theoretically, everyone can. However, if your page design discourages them, they won't. Some examples of page design elements which discourage users:
- Tiny-sized pink text on a black background will irritate almost everyone if they have to stare at it long enough, but it will especially discourage people with visual disabilities.
- Using colour to indicate difference will be lost on people with colour blindness.
- Text contained in images cannot be read by browsers which read text aloud to a blind user.
- High bandwidth content (large graphics, digital audio or video) on a home page is enticing to some users, but may discourage others from waiting the several minutes it will take to download the page.
- Older computers cannot the support the latest browser versions, and therefore may not be able to process Javascript commands or content which requires plugins.
What can we do to help?
As a business owner, you make the final decisions about who your customers are and how you are going to appeal to your customers. If you would like to widen your customer base online, then consider these strategies for making pages more accessible.
- Use text as the main method of presenting content
- Use multiple navigation methods, including text-based navigation. Navigation and menu headings which seems intuitive to you can be a mystery to someone else
- Links should be large enough so that they are easy to hit with a cursor, even for those with mobility problems.
- Spell out your dates, instead of using numerals. (30 September 2006 as opposed to 30/09/2006.) Since your pages could be accessed anywhere in the world, a date such as 5/4/07 could get confusing to someone in a country where month/day/year format is used.
- Colours and graphics should be chosen to add to the page, not detract or complicate needlessly.
Design should support content, not content suffer from design.
Testing for accessibility
At Capricorn Web, we check our pages for accessibility using online tools provided by W3Cs Website Accessibility Initiative (WAI). They have a number of checkpoints grouped in three levels and we aim to pass all checkpoints where possible. We also check download times for our pages and aim to achieve download times under 10 seconds on a slow connection.
Browser compatibility
When building web sites, it is important to ensure that the pages used in your website are supported by a variety of browsers. Visitors will likely use different operating systems, screen sizes, screen resolutions and browsers to access your site and what they actually see will vary from what you see on your computer. At Capricorn Web, we avoid using elements or attributes not supported by a web browser and design sites that suit a variety of personal settings so that presentation issues are minimised.
Browsers were designed to be infinitely customizable to each user. A user may override the colour scheme, font choice, font size, and graphics.
Designing for print
Our web sites are print friendly. We include a separate print style sheet that specifies how a printed version of the page will look. Unnecessary graphics and colours are deleted and if you prefer, we can also hide menus and other elements of the page but add other information such as contact details.