If you wrote code for only 1 disability, which one would it be?

Accessibility
61

Lawlz, good comeback Bob! : )

However think about this: if you’re that worried about spastics, and space everything out real far, you’re screwing over the screen mag users in some sense, unless the site is a very standard/common setup, right?

Same goes for Deaf-with-$lang-as-a-second-language, or site-$lang-as-a-second-language, or severe dyslexics: I cannot and will not create any site to cater to those people if it’s going to adversely affect a target group, or the general surfing population. So, same for spastics: If I were building a support-group site and forum for people with severe twitching and motor issues, sure, I’d be designing for them, but once it starts to compromise another user set that I can expect may visit, I have to decide not to do it.

Sometimes you can get away with simplifying text or the layout. Sometimes, though, you can’t. In which case, you have to decide whether your audience must meet certain requirements (this isn’t different from YouTube requiring that you have the Flash plugin and speakers to view their main purpose for existing, watch/listen to videos) in order to make use of the site or not.

And for that matter, if your target group has language issues (SL+, young children, dyslexics, whatever) then you may be making more use of something like Flash or JS for animation, sounds, or mouse-assists (I dunno what they’re called, they direct your mouse when you get in the general area of something clickable), which themselves may be barriers to other types of surfers.

Sometimes you can’t win for losing. So, if it’s a general web site for the general public, I make it logical, semantic, text-based (for the most part) and layer the other junk on top (CSS, JS) and let that take care of the majority of possible issues users may have. You can’t be all things to all people, but you can certainly lose plenty of hair trying.

62

You know, I never actually bothered looking for that system sound, but when I’m running JAWS, it’s through headphones so my colleagues aren’t listening to Stephen Hawking all day. And the click, for whatever reason, is about twice as loud as JAWS. Instead of looking to turn it off, I’ve been pulling the phones a bit in front of my ears when I click a link. Lawlz.

Total blindness is prolly the easiest to build for, at least until AJAX starts getting used a lot on a page. Deafness, I’ve never transscribed a video and otherwise avoid noises on my pages, and I don’t write content anyway. That’s the client’s job unless they want to hire a copywriter. It’s their message, not mine. Colourblindness, I’m glad I keep it in mind so that I don’t let any content text like “click on the green button” get through. One of our original pages from several years ago had calendars that used colour to show if a house was occupied or available. Now, it’s text-based and colour-enhanced.

Semantic code and logical order of content would keep most problems from appearing (excepting dyslexics and low-language-skilled visitors), along with some dirty user testing to show you where you didn’t do that as well as you thought you did.

63

I’d write code for spastics. That way it’d cover a lot of different bases.

64

A website with text content would surely need no modification to cater for deaf people?

65

Or getting shot. :wink:

66

Stress!

67

Got it in one. That such a question would even come up would probably result in a real-life back-hand around here.

Of course, if you bother paying attention to what HTML is FOR, how semantic markup works, practice graceful degradation of ‘ain’t it neat’ enhancements with separation of presentation from content…

…AND BOTHER READING AND TRYING TO FOLLOW THE WCAG…

… The entire question should be a non-issue.

But of course most people just sleaze out pages any old way letting some art *** dick around in photoshop with no knowledge of the subject, crapping out markup using fireworks and dreamweaver OR WORSE… Not a care in the world for using ANY of the technologies in a proper or even sane manner.

Starting to remember why I’m retired. I kept at it I WOULD have ended up shooting someone.

68

As Deathshadow wrote, coding for a disability is something which should be a natural part of building a web page. It should be like asking for whether you code your page for people wearing red og blue sweaters.

If forced to give an answer, however, I would chose a disability which would be the least likely to be able to muddle through a poorly designed website. Colour blind and dyslexic can highlight text and if necessary copy-paste it to a text editor to increase contrast and text size, and decrease line width. Thus, I would prefer to cater for blind users (again, if forced to chose), whose main problem is poor page structure.

69
  • deaf people. Because it’s soooooo easy.
70

Do you possess that skill, Rudy? I don’t.

I hope you didn’t mean to be funny, as in ‘har har you don’t have to do anything special for deaf people on a web page’.

71

In Opera, Preferences -> Advanced -> Notifications I have “Enable Program Sounds” checked. These include Page Loaded, Failure, Follow Link, and Transfer Done. I suppose there might be a way to add other events, but for most (especially focus and click) I depend on visual clues since they don’t cause a sound. An audible “click” would be nice for those too. But sometimes normal link color change is broken and for those the “click” is handy. I guess I could write my own CSS to over-ride the “links that don’t look like links” in those rare cases, but I haven’t yet.

72

I’m guessing he means the click IE makes when you click a link. The one set in the “Sounds” options in the windows control panel.

73

deafness

74

There is no little click (unless you mean the sound that your mouse makes when you press the button - assuming that your mouse actually clicks when you press the button).

Or do you mean that you have configured your browser to do that for you?

It isn’t something that you can control from within a web page (unless you use JavaScript to attach sound files to events).

75

I’d say that is the ‘wrong’ question. The important thing is not which disability is the most common, but which disability causes the most problem when a web page doesn’t take it into consideration.

The most common disability is probably visual impairment, if you include all of us who need corrective lenses (plus those with more severe sight problems, of course). But for most of us it’s not a major obstacle. With glasses or contacts we’ll get by fine. Even without them we can often manage by zooming the page, something contemporary browsers are all capable of.

People with very poor eyesight, but not completely blind, rely on screen magnifiers to use the web. Bad layout is a big problem for them, since they see only a small portion of the screen at a time (like looking through a keyhole). Similar layout failures cause problems for people with motor skill impairments, which may also include those with chronic and severe pain in joints or muscles, like rheumatism.

Colour-deficient vision can be a serious complication, but only on certain sites. It’s relatively common (~8% of the male population, ~1% of females). Poor colour contrast can cause problems for this user group, but also stupid instructions like ‘press the green button to confirm’.

Then we have the ‘difficult’ problems: content! Many users have some form of diminished reading capability. The reasons vary, from disabilities like dyslexia and ADD/ADHD to brain injuries and aphasia. People who are deaf since birth or early childhood usually cannot read as well as hearing people. Those who aren’t reading in their first language are also at a disadvantage. And people who simply don’t read much have, of course, more difficulties reading than us bookworms.

And these problems cannot be fixed simply by applying some clever HTML tags or attributes, or by doing the graphic design with some degree of competence. They require copywriting skills, often beyond those found in most web designers/developers/authors.

I realise that I’m not answering your question, and in fact I’m not going to. I think that if a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing well. That means I wouldn’t ‘adapt’ for one disability and ignore all others, because that is anathema to my entire being.

I just wanted to highlight that you shouldn’t be looking at sheer numbers, but at the consequences. If 20% of your visitors experience mild problems and are able to overcome them using built-in browser functions, it’s less of an issue than if 2% of the visitors are completely locked out.

And to those who are bound to chime in with comments about ROI and how it ‘just ain’t worth it’ to build accessible sites, I’ll just ask them to take their callous, greedy comments elsewhere. Remember: there are no pockets on the shroud.

76

Blindness. Blind people use the net
quite extensively as it connects them
to the world in ways gthey cannot
connect otherwise.

77

:lol: Nicely put!

Personally I’d say mental disability. In other words, I’d cater for IE6 users.

78

Stress is disabling…

79

It seems I myself am guilty of the sin. I have a “music” section that I’ve considered getting rid of, but the pages still get a lot of hits so I’ve left them.

I can’t imagine a deaf person going to the “music” section without realizing that hearing ability is implied. Just the same, I have links like

<a href='/xmas04.mid'>Do You Hear What I Hear?</a>

To me, just seeing “mid” automatically translates to “cheesy digital instrumental”, but I guess having a title attribute saying the same is in order.

For

<a href='/gd11.ram'>Dark Star</a>

the bootleg music itself is OK to host (under certain conditions), but providing the lyrics might be a copyright violation. Still, I suppose some kind of title attribute is in order.

EDIT: A “type” attribute would be a good idea too.

80

They reckon about 1 in 10 people have dyslexic-like symptoms so that’s pretty prevalent too. If you use semantic (x)html in a strict sense; modularise, separate the JavaScript and CSS so that there is no dependency then that covers several bases.

To compensate for our plastic Lenses we have Zoom or increase text size built into the browser and if the page is authored correctly it will resize gracefully… Yes, I’ll avoid the “answer” because if you’ve built the page foundations correctly it should have at least basic accessibility inbuilt.

I suppose it’s really the non-markup objects like images that will be an issue (as you cannot control them as well) especially if you have ‘colour deficits’ or the “content” comprehension itself.