Accessibility and Web Design

You want your website to reach as many people as possible. Of course, that’s what it’s for, right? However, you may be inadvertently losing traffic and potential clients by not considering other’s abilities.

According to the American Foundation for the Blind, 25 million Americans have significant vision loss. Many people who are legally blind cannot drive a car but they can see your website with the aid of assistive technology. Some assistive technology is as simple just magnifying the text on the screen; some people use screen readers; you can read about other types of visual assistance here.

Although much of the web is purely visual, many times we like to include video in our presentations. If someone is hearing impaired, this part of our site — sometimes a crucial part — can be completely inaccessible.

Here are a few tips to get you started on considering making your site more accessible:

1. Put alt tags or captions on  every image. This allows a site-impaired person to access what the image is about if they can’t see it.
2. Make it easy for users to enlarge text. Us designers may get stuck on having the perfect, pretty font, and may use Flash or JPEGs to embed titles on our page. Whenever you can, use plain text that can be enlarged or otherwise easily read. And keep in mind that almost no one over the age of 40 can read 9 point font.
3. Caption all video. If you want to use Flash, there are easy freeware tools such as Magpie to accomplish this. Also, Google/YouTube is introducing automatic captioning, although as they themselves demonstrate, it’s not an exact science. To make sure you get the text right, soon you can use their auto-timing feature, which will use a speech-to-text algorithm to caption a video using your uploaded text file. For now you’ll still have to upload a caption file, which needs timecodes to work.

Lastly, Google has a variety of accessibility resources here. Of course, these tips and resources are not an exhaustive list. The point here is to start including ideas for accessibility in your design process.

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