Category: Digital Accessibility

The W3C has extensive information on how to properly evaluation a sites accessibility. Here are the underlining steps to ensure that your evaluation is full-proof: For a preliminary review, select a page that is representative of the whole site or that most people will see. Try to choose a page that has tabular data, images and scripts. And then: Examine this page for alternative text, Divs instead of tables for page layout, Use the keyboard instead of the mouse for navigation, Test with different font-sizes and screen resolutions. The Firebug and Web Developer extensions in Firefox will make your life…

Did you know that according to Statistics Canada in 2006 there was 1,289,420 Canadians with a hearing impairment, 835,960 Canadians with a seeing impairment, 2,856,820 Canadians with an agility impairment, and 752,110 Canadians with a learning impairment. In every case, around 70% of these Canadians said that they had used the Internet in the past year. Let me crunch the numbers.  That’s 5,734,310 Canadians with the above mentioned impairments of 31,612,897, the total population recorded that year. So…there’s roughly about 13% of Canadians, with these impairments, that use the Internet.  That’s a lot of people if you ask me! Ok,…

I recently read an article in the Website Magazine on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and I was happy to see that a couple of the elements listed where directly related to web standards. Title, headers, using HTML only for content, and being clear and concise were all part of focusing on the most important thing on your site: the content. For any starting website, content is the most important element. No matter the amount of eye-candy that your site could have, the content is what your users will come back for.Sure eye-candy is cool and with future browsers some cool…

Ok so Canada does not have the national equivalent to the United States section 508. But if you want to know what they recommend you can read their Common Look and Feel standards for the Internet documentation. Obviously the information is for government and public sector websites, but it could be useful to get another perspective on standards and accessibility. It basically lists out the main things we need to remember for guidelines and best practices.

Sure accessibility guidelines are designed to help people with disabilities access the web, but it extends to more than just them. I am talking about the elderly, people with low literacy or little fluency in the language the site is made, people that have dial-up or a low bandwidth connection, and even new or infrequent web users. Let me illustrate exactly how web accessibility will improve the user experience: Elderly people might have a deteriorating eyesight and will need to make the text bigger. So avoid having fixed font size. Low literacy or little fluency in a language can ultimately…

Accessibility guidelines are primarily developed for people with either visual, hearing or physical impairments and disabilities. Here are basic descriptions of some ways people with disabilities use the internet: People with visual impairments might use a screen reader. This is a software that will read out loud the text of the web page. They might also use a text browser and need to make the text bigger. Just think about the elderly that have weaker eyesight. People that have hearing impairments won’t be able to hear music or audio.  Captions or transcripts are the only ways to not alienate them.…

As far as I know, web accessibility in Canada is up to each province to legislate.  There are several attempt to make websites accessible in government and educational institutions. Most if not all government websites in Canada are now accessible. But unfortunately, there are no laws to ensure that accessibility guidelines are respected. A special notice should be given to W3Québec. An organization dedicated to promote web accessibility across Québec. Another organization is Accéssibilité Web that have done substantial studies on the matter and have translated WCAG 2.0 in French. Unlike the US, the Canadian government has yet to make…

The article Why web standards are important in web design by Dustin Brewer is absolutely a must read. It explains quite well the fundamentals of web standards. Brewer does not only relate the topic in terms of what it represents to the designer or developer, but he also looks at the clients perspective. If this doesn’t convince you to adopt web standards, I don’t know what will.

I have been using this tool for some time now. It’s simple and straight forward. It will tell you if your colour combinations are good or not.  Large and bolded text are categorized differently than smaller text. The program also tells you what priority your combination represents. Priority 3 (AAA) is the lowest level, so for all intents and purposes, this is the minimum requirements. Although the page is a little clutered for my liking, I bare it. After all it’s free! Check it out at: http://www.colorsontheweb.com/colorcontrast.asp

Content management systems (CMS) have become very popular in the last 3 years or so. They usually are pretty easy to install and to upgrade, but not all of them have accessibility in mind. What often happens is that the theme designer has to make it her or his business to create a site as accessible as possible. I came across some CMS that have accessibility integrated into the system in an article written by the National Center on Disability and Access to Education named NCDAE Tips and Tools: Content Management Systems & Accessibility. They explain the major challenges that…