What is Web Page Accessibility?

Making Your Website Available To Everyone

Do you know what it is like to be one of your clients, or a prospective client, a site visitor, supplier, vendor, sponsor, or donor who is living with a visual impairment and trying to use your website?

Is your site easy for them to navigate?


Blind Visitors

A screen reader navigates the content of a web page and vocalizes important content for sightless web users to hear. By scanning through a HTML version of your website’s content, the screen reader selects what to speak aloud and what to skip.

To experience this technology for yourself:

  • A Windows user can download the IBM Homepage Reader for a free 30-day trial. A recent version of Microsoft Windows and a PC with a Pentium processor or its equivalent are required. Once you’ve downloaded the Homepage Reader, you can turn off your monitor and try to navigate your own website without seeing it.
  • For Linux users, available open source screen readers include Emacspeak and IBM ViaVoice.
  • The new Mac OS X will have a built-in spoken interface. At this time, Mac OS X users can download and use a preview version of this technology.

Poor or Partial Sight

Web users who have poor or partial sight need to be able to enlarge the text on your website pages. Most modern browsers provide print text resizing capability.

If you are an Internet Explorer/Windows user, you will be able to choose a font size as a percent, in ems, or with a comparative term such as small, medium or large. Another method is to use a basic or advanced style sheet switcher to enable text resizing.

Color Blindness

One in 12 men and one in 200 women are believed to have some degree of color blindness. To view your website as these people do, you can use Vischeck.

Deaf Users

People who are hard of hearing can use the Internet in the same way other people do, except for audio content. If hearing an audible message is important for your website, you can offer a written transcript of this content should be easily available to your site users.

Keyboard/voice Only Users

Try to navigate your website using only tab, shift-tab and return keys on your keyboard, and you will be able to feel the frustrations of those site users who cannot use a mouse for browsing the Internet.

Other Internet User Challenges

Some people may find obstacles to using your website, such as:

  • Web users living with epilepsy must avoid catching sight of attention grabbing text or graphics that flicker between 2 and 55 Hz.
  • Jargon and acronyms may be meaningless to web users from outside of your industry.
  • Web users whose education is incomplete or whose first language is not English may have difficulty comprehending complicated language—like this sentence.

New (and old) Technology

PDAs and Mobile Devices

Compare the 3 million PDAs sold during 2002 in Western Europe to the estimated 58 million PDAs predicted to be sold in the same area during 2008. It is obvious that using a handheld device to access the Internet is a rapidly expanding phenomenon.

In handheld devices, large images, JavaScript, Flash, and all too often even CSS can have patchy support and be as small as 120 pixels wide, with horizontal scrolling unavailable.

WebTV

By downloading a free WebTV viewer, you can see how your website would look on a TV screen that has a maximum width of 575 pixels, with horizontal scrolling not an option.

JavaScript

About 5% of web users have a browser without support for JavaScript (such as the text-only Lynx browser), or JavaScript has been turned off for security reasons or to avoid pop ups.

Slow connections

Broadband is less widespread than you may think. For instance, only one in 6 Internet households in the UK had broadband service at this time last year. Users with slower connections may turn off all images for speedier downloads. Make sure you put in those ALT attributes!