Want to feel bad that your site isn’t as accessible as it could or should be? Looking to persuade a client that accessibility is something they should care about (and pay for)?
Then watch this short video (7:11) (or read the related article) from the BBC which has some nice real-world examples of how the laziness of web designers impacts this particular group of users.
And don’t forget this telling finding:
… if a site is accessible by a disabled user it is also a third quicker for an able-bodied person to complete tasks too.
Good to see it in the media. However it is sad that so many times we have to justify doing accessibility work because it will help non-disabled people too.
Not that there is no merit behind that idea, but accessibility should stand on it’s own.
Hi Christian,
Enjoyed your blog. You may be interested to hear, along a similar theme, that it is not just navigation that good design accelerates for us all. But reading too … this can increase up to two fold depending on the circumstances.
In designing ReadPal, a novel product to help us all read quicker, we found that the preferred formatting of the visually disabled correlated very well with increased reading speed for the normal-sighted.
It’s a product which is completely free for non-business use. It also helps a lot so we’d appreciate it if you might give us a plug.
Thanks and all the best,
Louis
Great post! A colleague of mine found it and told me about it. Very good “real-life” news segment on how inaccessible sites can be so much trouble for those with disabilities. I do a podcast on web accessibility called Web Axe, so I found it very useful. I will give this blog entry a mention!
Julie Howell, the technical author of PAS78 made absolute sense when she described accessibility as accessing the web, rather than focusing on disability but I don’t understand Léonie Watson, web developer for Nomensa, when she mentions CSS being a new technology [2 years old???] that designers are wary of using. She made it sound like something to fear.
It’s this high-level misinformation that is deterimental to driving the standards to the mainstream. Although they highlighted the key technologies and I think I even heard a mention of the W3, not enough was done in the report to make it constructive to the people that publish to the web. It’s my fault for thinking people in a position to make a difference would use the opportunity to do so. Never mind.
*Ed* – I agree with you that CSS is not a new technology.
However, (sadly) there are many designers and developers who have only a limited understanding of its proper application and so, from that standpoint, it has a long way to go before it has the same level of mainstream acceptance as, say, HTML.