Web Accessibility

“Many of the commonly-used techniques of requirements capture for mobile technologies are inappropriate for use with older people, for a variety of reasons,” it says. “These may be related to problems associated with age, cognitive complexity and motivation. The result is to restrict the potential of mobile technologies to provide support to older people.”

A huge problem with almost every CMS in existence is the extremely poor quality of the code produced by their WYSIWYG editors.

Since visual gadgetry like WYSIWYG editors sells, every CMS has to have one.

That, in turn, makes it necessary for Web professionals who want to reduce the risk of clients unknowingly ruining the website’s semantics and accessibility to disable features and implement more or less advanced code cleaning procedures. It is a mess.

United Nations Global Audit of Web Accessibility, conducted by accessibility agency Nomensa on behalf of the United Nations, shows that 97 percent of websites fail to meet the most basic accessibility requirements.

A story on the BBC News website, ‘Most websites’ failing disabled, notes that 93 percent did not provide alternative text for all images, 73 percent relied on JavaScript for important functionality, and 98 percent of the sites did not use valid markup.

New Dutch accessibility law.

A few highlights of what is required: separate structure from presentation do not use deprecated markup when creating a new website, use a Strict doctype use progressive enhancement create semantic class and id values use the W3C DOM when scripting script-only links must be generated by JavaScript do not use the alt attribute to create tooltips

Some people call me a validation fanatic, and maybe they are right. I do want every HTML document I create and all the sites I build to be valid and remain valid. Validation is an integral part of quality assurance to me

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.