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The sad truth is a lot of accessible design on the web these days is being done by people who lack the design talent to create sites which are both accessible and attractive. There is nothing inherent within industry best practices for accessibility which prevents flash & glitz, it's just that there are so few examples of it out there. This has led many people to incorrectly assume that accessible design means you'll have to give up images or multimedia. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Accessibility is "built in" to all of the recommendations published by the W3C. With few exceptions, accessible production is not more time consuming if the site is done properly the first time. Nowhere is this truer than in today's data driven web where sites are largely produced from templates and driven by server-side scripting pulling content from databases. Accessibility can be included early in the development cycle and add literally nothing to the time or money it takes to perform final production.
Assistive technology can only interpret information that is formatted to the same W3C standards that you should be using anyway. There is no guarantee that the user will have a specific brand, type, or version of assistive technology. Furthermore, not all impairments can be overcome with assistive technology.
"Text-only" only accommodates one type of disability: blindness. Some disabled people benefit from more graphics, not less, because the graphics may aid in understanding the rest of the content. "Regular" web pages, created correctly, are more capable of being accessible to a wider audience. Additionally, text only versions may mean you now have two sites to maintain. Even if you generate the text only version dynamically, this is often seen by the disabled community as relegating them to second-class status.
The User-Agent Strings of Assistive Technology often identify themselves as common browsers, such as Internet Explorer. This means there's no quantitative measure of how many disabled visitors your site has.
"Disabled" is often misinterpreted as blind people with zero vision. However, there is a wide array of possible special impairments, severity of those impairments and even possible combinations of impairments. There are also countless unknown people who do not report themselves as disabled yet have an impairment which can cause problems on your site.
Author:
Karl Groves
| Date Added: Friday, October 05, 2007
Categories:
Accessibility Management | Rated: 
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