People are born far from perfect; some people have more than others, while some have less. As technology crawls deeper into people's life and the internet grow faster by the day, the number of users increases. And as the number increases, the more often we will see people with disabilities.
When people talk about a website's accessibility, they are referring to whether a website can be used by people with disabilities. For example, can a blind person use your website, navigate through the available pages and access all of its content?
The internet is a network of networks where people are connected. As it grow larger, more and more websites available today are trying to reach more viewers by giving the possibilities for people with disabilities to join the rapidly increasing community.
Disabilities on the Internet
There are undoubtedly many types of disabilities. The 4 major user disabilities in the World Wide Web are: color blindness, poor eyesight, blindness, and both blind and deaf.
Color blindness
There are different types of color blindness. There are those that cause the person to see everything in monochrome colors (black and white), the very common red-green color blindness where the person can not (or finds it difficult to) distinguish red and green hues, and the blue-yellow color blindness where a person have the problem to discriminating between blue and yellow hues. Even within each of these broad categories, there are differences in the way they perceive colors.
The different types of color blindness can cause the colors of a site to appear completely different from what it is intended. The end result is that a text may be indistinguishable from the background, or the elements on a page may appear merged with the rest of the page.
Solution
A website may use colors as its main attractiveness. But to make people with disabilities use the site with ease, a site should not be dependent on colours. For example, if the only way to distinguish a link from normal text on a site is by its color, it is possible that a color-blind person will not be able to see any links on your site if the choice of color is not chosen properly.
Black text on a white background is usually used on sites to make important information more visible. This color combination is readable by anyone, colour-blind or not.
Poor Eyesight
People with poor eyesight are people who have difficulty in reading or seeing things clearly, even with the aid of glasses. This not only includes people who may have inherited poor eyesight, or have them through accidents, but also for the large number of elderly people. As a person grows older, he/she will eventually faces failing vision.
Solution
Some websites are highly focused on aesthetics, and see the text as merely part of the sites' overall visual appearance rather than the most important part of the page. This could be a problem for people with poor eyesight to browse and navigate the site. Texts on a site should be made readable on desktops, notebooks, tablets, and other handheld devices. Since notebooks usage is increasing, exceeding desktops in some countries, a site that uses small print can give its audience difficulties.
Aesthetics is not everything. If visitors cannot see what what a website is offering, or find great difficulty reading, the site is not going to be as successful as it can be.
Another thing that will help people with poor eyesight is to make sure that the colors of the text and the background have a high contrast. Incorrect combinations of colors can make texts difficult to distinguish for both people with poor eyesight and people with normal eyesight.
Although white text on a black background may seem to fulfill the suggestion of contrasting colors, in general, for things that are read on a computer monitor, black text on a white background is vastly better, and yet still commonly used.
Blindness
Most people may not realize that that blind people can and do surf the web as well. With the help of software known as screen readers, people with this disability can browse the web normally. These programs read aloud everything that appears on the screen to their users.
Surfing the web with a screen reader is a tedious business, and people with normal sight may not be able to fully appreciate the chore. Screen reader goes through an entire web page and reads it aloud, line by line, in the exact order in which the words appear in the HTML code which may not correspond to the visual order.
Solution
Screen readers cannot "read" images. Some websites are created with web pages that consist of rich pictures. It is possible that these sites to be unusable for blind people. In order for images to be meaningful to a blind person, images need to have description tags added. This description tags are called "ALT" tags in HTML.
As a side effect, putting ALT tags on images will benefit a site not just with blind visitors, but also with the search engines, which for all practical intents and purposes, are also "blind".
Websites should also avoid using images for describing important information. Images should only be used for design elements and other things that need pictures.
On some websites, before filling an online form, or posting a comment, users are required to enter a series of letters and numbers shown in a picture, known as a CAPTCHA test, designed to make sure that the one filling in the form is a human being and not a computer program (spambot). While the reasons for implementing a sort of CAPTCHA test are understandable, the image also prevents blind users from using the web form. On some sites, as well as some CAPTCHA scripts, provide a link to an audio file which the visitor can play to read the string of letters and numbers aloud.
Advanced Approach
The methods below are used by many accessibility-aware sites.
- Main content first in the HTML code.
- Shortcut to skip navigation menu.
- Sections devided with appropriate headings.
- Independent JavaScripts.
- Flash Objects with Accessibility in Mind.
Blind and Deaf
People that are both blind and deaf can also surf and browse the web by using a Braille console that translates the text on a web page into Braille symbols which they can feel with their fingers.
Conclusion
People are not born perfect, and many have deficiencies. Everything that is created and built should be able to be used by everyone. People with disabilities may be unable to do many things that normal people can. By giving them the ease to do what many others can, the internet can be a place where anyone can be, no matter how they currently are.