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With the goal of better understanding how people interact with the Web via various types of Assistive Technology (AT) — and what that might mean for developers and designers — Karo Caran takes us on a 16 minute overview of screen magnification software (in this case ZoomText) and how it is used by partially-sighted users to interact with the Web. Karo shows you the basic toolkit and then applies those tools to some typical web sites to give you some perspective on how she uses magnification software while she browses the web.

A screen reader simply enables a blind person to use the applications and operating system on a computer without sight by converting on-screen text into a Braille or spoken format. Intelligent screen readers like Window-Eyes deliver information in a linear format, interpret the active window, read complex web pages and perform many other advanced functions.

Although scripting is, by far, the number one enhancement found in this latest Window-Eyes release, other new features are noteworthy in their own right. Geoffray tells us that Window-Eyes is now 100 percent Unicode compliant. This enables access to foreign language text, certain PDF documents not previously readable, Microsoft Word’s smart quoting feature and any other situation where use of special symbols is required. Intelligent place markers may now be defined on dynamic web pages delivering quick access to a specific area of the page based not only on its virtual line number, but also on the text at the cursor. A new Eloquence speech synthesizer, access to the Firefox 3.0 web browser, support for the public beta version of Internet Explorer 8.0

One major new piece of work undertaken by WAI is the EC-funded WAI-AGE Project (http://www.w3.org/WAI/WAI-AGE/), a look at the implications of an ageing population for web access, given the older people are more likely to have disabilities and may also be less familiar with new technologies. “Demographics worldwide are dramatically changing at the moment,” says Andrew Arch, who works with Abou-Zahra on WAI-AGE. “The proportions of older to younger people are changing as well as the numbers. We’re living longer, and we haven’t got the support behind us. “Lots of things have got to change in governments and organisations - with an ageing workforce, you have to keep learning to stay accessible.”

The WAI-AGE project is partly aimed at finding out whether there are any significant new pieces of work needed to ensure web accessibility for an older population, Arch says. “We’ve looked at what research and user observation has gone on over the decade. There is a pretty big overlap between older people and others with disabilities - sight starts to decline, motor dexterity - and individually these overlap. But with older people there is often a lack of recognition that there is a disability there. For example some people might just say they can’t remember so well, rather than that they have a cognitive impairment. Or people won’t see failing eye-sight as a disability, it’s just ‘part of growing old’. But they are disabilities, and often multiple disabilities.”

Having gained a grasp of current research the project returned to guidelines such as WCAG 2.0 to see if any changes might be needed. “A large proportion of the needs of older people are met by the new guidelines, but other things might need to feed into the guidance we will issue on implementing the guidelines, for example guidance on how people prepare content for older people.,” said Arch. “Many older people have not grown up with computers, and may not realise their capabilities, for example that you can magnify text in your browser.”

Personally I have several reasons for advocating Web accessibility. First of all an idealistic one: I want everybody to be able to use the Web. I am not disabled (yet), so I can (and am often forced to) muddle through sites that are badly built, but a person with a disability may not be able to. Since it is possible to build sites that almost everybody can use, I don’t see why we shouldn’t. Then a few reasons that some may call selfish: I do not have any problems related to motor skills, but I have a really hard time using dropdown and flyout menus, especially hierarchical ones, as well as phony Flash or JavaScript scrollbar imitations. Accessible sites in general either do not contain such obstacles or provide ways around them. Despite having no substantial eyesight problems, I find reading tiny text (below 11px is tiny to me), low contrast text, and reading any size high contrast, light-on-dark text to be very straining. A website designed with accessibility in mind is less likely to cause legibility problems for me. I like being able to use my keyboard to navigate websites. Accessible sites are keyboard friendly since they do not force people to use a mouse.

Any web developer who has created a reasonably complex form is probably aware of the concept of multiple select elements that are connected – choosing something from one select box either makes a new select box appear or changes the options of one that is already visible. There are usually two problems with this approach. One is that most implementations are completely dependent on JavaScript being available. Often there either is no submit button at all, or there is a submit button but without JavaScript there is no way to access the options that appear only as a result of changing the first select box. The other problem is that in some browsers, using the cursor keys to change the selected option triggers the onchange event immediately, so you can never get past the first option unless you know how to use your keyboard to display all options. I normally work around these problems by requiring users to submit the form to get the next set of options from the server. Obviously that isn’t an ideal solution either. So what other options do we have? One option that looks promising is described by Christian Heilmann in Unobtrusive connected select boxes - yet another solution approach. It involves using optgroup elements to create a two-level select box, which is then split into two separate select boxes if JavaScript is available. Neat. The solution Chris describes solves (or at least mitigates) the keyboard access problem since it doesn’t reload the page when the onchange event is triggered. And if JavaScript is unavailable, there is a single select box with option groups. The catch is that nested optgroup elements are not allowed in current versions of HTML, so this will not work when more than two connected select boxes are needed. Nested optgroup elements are allowed in the current Web Forms 2.0 Working Draft, so I guess there is a reasonable chance of that change making it into HTML 5.

The BBC has developed a script called Betsie, which will convert pages to plain HTML.

There can be a fine line between enabling and excluding technology. All it takes is some careless HTML, the addition of a few unsupported images and some multimedia frills, and entire web sites can disappear from view for substantial numbers of users.

In Boagworld podcast episode 130, I discovered that in order to help test web accessibility, Paul Boag wears glasses (that he doesn't need) and gloves and attempts to navigate through a site. Excellent idea!In order to better understand [the elderly's] experience I have bought a pair to ski gloves and some reading glasses (I don't need reading glasses). Every now and again, I surf the site I am designing wearing both the glasses and gloves. The glasses make the screen hard to read while the gloves hamper my use of the mouse and the keyboard. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to select something from a drop down menu wearing ski gloves!