I know there are lots of various disabilities and limitations users might have when it comes to the web. And I know I take my relative good health and abilities for granted much more than I should.
I suppose which disability is most important depends on which you have. For example, my weak point is vision impairment (thank goodness for correctiive lenses) so I’m more likely to have trouble with a page that has poor contrast or difficult font. But I have no trouble working my mouse so I wouldn’t even notice if a site had poor tabbing navigation.
Anyway, I’m wondering, of all the different types of disabilities and limitations that should be taken into consideration when putting a page together, which is the most common? That is, if you needed to prioritize and could only ensure that one thing only was up to snuff, what would it be?
Vision is important, but the brain is the most important thing. It is said that a person who could once see, can still imagine seeing with his eyes closed and he can dream in visions. A seeing man who loses sight can still see inside his head. A man who was born blind can never dream in sight. Helen Keller was deaf and blind, but still became a great teacher - odd.
Install a toolbar such as Panopreter toolbar on IE browser that can read web page text content you selected. It’s helpful for various disabilities and limitations users when they are surfing online.
The delay will be only a tiny fraction of a second - you probably wouldn’t even notice it as a user, but it’s just enough that it won’t trigger the menu when you’re moving the mouse across the page and it passes over the menu
Increasingly with large sites what I’ve done is forget all that nonsense exists, and just break it into categories and just use by-page by-section drilldown through the site. People get too obesessed with linking every single sub-page off the main page, and that’s just a waste of time and can result in information overload. (even that article mentions that).
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If you really feel the need to have a page with every link on it, that’s what a sitemap page is for. Don’t waste your time or mine putting a sitemap on every page (yes, vBull 4 developers, I’m looking at your garbage when I say that)
It depends on how you’re building your site. I generally create a site in a text editor rather than using a CMS, and so having the full menu structure on each page means that I can just <!–#include it, which is a lot easier for maintenance.
You can’t code for them because emotional problems aren’t by definition down to a physical issue which prevents them accessing the content, it’s down to the way they interact and interpret the medium. I wasn’t by any means trying to say that you need to cover such aspects, I was simply putting down a point that if you have people who may be using the website and may suffer emotional issues, there are things you can put in place which can increase psychological calmness and aids you can have which can make them less likely to act out of frustration. In regards to color schemes, I’m not saying you should stop using red or something, there is however a psychological link between how people interpret colors and I’ve seen research which suggests that changes in the color can influence the chances of people buying from you. All I’m saying in summary is, keep every potential issue in mind, psychology is one of the most powerful tools we have as creative visual types and it can impact our audience greatly (especially if they have emotional issues), not accounting for such issues can be detrimental.
Good catch, I noticed after I posted (and the edit time went by) that I had attributed them (wrongly) as separate entities. :goof:
While it’s true their unlikely to do so, it’s wrong to say that US website owners don’t have to comply with international laws, if you trade with another nation (and websites often trade globally) you are REQUIRED to comply with all applicable laws with that nation. This has been well established in past legal cases where people have been sued across nations for violating laws which affect that nations citizens. Any site which deals with the UK in regards to selling or offering goods and or services can be legally held accountable for failures in meeting accessibility guidelines as they relate to the trade being undertaken. Essentially it’s a case of you either comply with accessibility laws or you could end up getting tangled up in litigation (or forced to stop selling “within” that nation).
Next you’ll tell me I have too much agressive red in my website. Seriously. If you’re TARGETING that group then, yes, by all means design for them. But how do you code for them?
I’m not making all my client’s web sites goofy pastel for the possibility that someone with emotional issues might wander past. Setting the tone of the content? These aren’t things that someone can have in a design and expect it to work for everyone… whereas, coding so that it’s also screen-reader or googlebot-friendly does not change design or code (assuming yes of course the code was originally written semantically and logically and all that yadda).
Section 508 is an amendment to the ADA, which otherwise does not say anything about the Internet (the whole reason 508 was added). And it only applies to government sites, sites who recieve US funding or sites who dole out US funding (that was the original purpose, sites where you could find out information about stuff like getting Disability payments or find out where public money was going). Public, commercial and private websites are neither touched by current ADA nor the 508 specific section. Sure, this could change, but it’s not changed yet.
The other laws are dealing with non-US countries, therefore the US can be typical US and ignore them. And it does.
The UK citizen would be entirely within their legal rights (as a disabled individual) to follow up legal action against the person in the USA for violating International law (especially with the new EU laws coming in) and they could have the person (under an extreme case) extradited to this country, charged and convicted under UK law for criminal offences against UK citizens (in regards to committing an offence against anti-discrimination laws).
The US would fight that. They don’t even extradite REAL crimminals to other countries half the time… they’re certainly not going to ship the owner of Joe’s Flash-based grocery site to the UK because some foreigner cried about it. The US and its citizens do not have to comply with UK laws, EU laws, or any other laws, unless the US agrees to it (the US would have to make a law saying US website owners must comply with UK or EU laws).
Instead, it’s the other way around. I remember when one of our politicians used the Freedom of Information Act to force the US to explain just WHY it was forcing Europeans to give up their banking information to the US (tho Europe was spineless enough to say yes to it, arg). The US makes demands of other countries; other countries do not make demands of the US.
Those too stupid to read and follow directions. That’s got to be the highest percentage of people in the U.S. because it covers both genders, all races and religions, and includes people of all ages.
I like M.C. Hammer. For those who may have forgotten, he was the guy with the attitude, bling, attrocious music, and baggy pants. In the context of the above remarks, can anyone suggest anything specific that would be required to develop a site catering for M.C. Hammer (and others like him)?
I have a few thoughts. However, I’m keen to hear what others think…
In fact, the only major browser that pure CSS drop downs don’t work for is IE6 and you can target an alternate stylesheet or script for that using conditional comments.
Hawking uses his very limited ability to move to write on a computer. Then a voice synthesizer adds the sound to his words.
Hawking is a theoretical physicist. His contributions to science are phenomenal. What a shame it would be if he was unable to use a computer. What knowledge would remain hidden from our view?
A lack of accessibility is more than a website just missing a customer. It isn’t what we are making those with disabilities miss. It’s what we may, and probably do miss because of our own inaction. It impedes not only the abilities of those with disabilities, but also our progress as a people.
You can design for emotional instability actually, I’ve found from working with people suffering severe emotional and psychological disabilities from everything from dyslexia and anger management to schizophrenia that making your website work seamlessly (no errors), ensuring your design emotes the right kind of feel (no aggressive flashing images or intrusive components), the use of soft colors, good contrasts, and using “neutral language” (IE: None aggressive or trollish comments in content) will often reduce the anxiety and stress which cause people suffering emotional problems to suffer. Just thought I would add to this as I didn’t want people to think it’s not possible to design with these people in mind (I recommend people buying a book on psychology to gain a better insight into their users).
One of the main problems with disabilities is that people tend to reduce them to a childlike state. The point of accessibility is to make things work and function for a wide range of people with impairments, not to sacrifice everything to mollycoddle them and treat the end user like a baby. The disabled hate being talked down too, and they won’t appreciate stereotypes, sweeping statements or false assumptions and dumbing down.
Precisely, I think “picking” favourites among the disabled community is both counter productive to the cause and it’s rather insulting to people involved. Emotions aside I would prefer people to be pro-active with needs rather than perceptions and checklists of restrictive issues.
Sorry to tell you this Dave, but your totally wrong, Section 508 (which I’m assuming your hinting towards) does indeed apply just to government sites, but that doesn’t mean inherently that there’s no laws which speak in general about websites needing to be accessible. In the USA there’s the ADA (American Disabilities Act), in the UK, Australia and Canada (and several places in Europe) there are variations of the DDA (Disability Discrimination Act), in Italy there’s the Stanca Act, in Germany there’s BITV… and there’s others including a new EU act on the way (Stomme can post it, I can’t remember the name, lol)… all of these implicitly apply to disability relating to public services (some even extent to personal websites). So yes… making a website inaccessible (especially a commercial one) is now a criminal offence.
Even more interesting, I know someone involved in accessibility law and he told me that because the UK’s DDA is so wide reaching (due to international law and how the UK legislation applies outside it’s borders), if an American website owner who hosted his website on US soil refused to amend his commercial website to make it meet something close to compliance, and a UK citizen suffered as a result. The UK citizen would be entirely within their legal rights (as a disabled individual) to follow up legal action against the person in the USA for violating International law (especially with the new EU laws coming in) and they could have the person (under an extreme case) extradited to this country, charged and convicted under UK law for criminal offences against UK citizens (in regards to committing an offence against anti-discrimination laws). Sounds pretty scary I know but I’ve read the laws and the factors involved seem pretty fair in that they’ll only hit the worst offenders in serious circumstances (and perhaps we’ll weed out some accessibility damaging “web professionals” too).
Stupidity may be an illness (of sorts) but there’s only so much you can do about it
It’s his persona which he vaguely approves of which is good enough! Plus he beat up Moby. He also has a music video somewhere where he defeats and religious zealot. Awesome.
