Is Your Web Site Accessible?

I provide an audio version of all my posts via Odiogo. I don't think that it is perfectly accessible but I have to practice that. Already when using Odiogo I realized that images without detailed tagging are just non-existent. So I am trying to make it a point from now on to either limit images to a minimum or to generously annotate them. My menu is at the top. I think ads and tags and category links are bottom of the list after my actual posts which should all be available through the main navigation. or the RSS feed. I am going to put up a link to RSS in addition to my RSS2 feed. I thought the more visual the better but now that I think of it the regular RSS stripping out the images and such may be a good way to tell if I am accessible friendly. Thanks for the article to remind me. :-) http://www.jack-in.com

This is a good checklist of points and I particularly like the one "Can you resize text with the browser?" as there is more emphasis on browser zooming these days (which has to be a good thing) but we shouldn't forget those still using IE6 and prior versions.

http://accessibleweb.eu/

Isn't it funny what happens when you see the world through someone else's point of view. I had no idea of what questions to ask to ensure that my site is accessible to everyone. This morning, I noticed how nicely someone's site showed up on my phone. Why doesn't mine? Well, now I have new questions to ask to ensure accessibility.

Thanks! Welcome to BTS! Thanks for sharing this post with us.

Tom
I'd love for my sites to be accessible, and I'd love to have captioning on all my videos, but I find it too cost prohibitive. Is there a way that you know of to get help with captioning on videos?.. I'm trying to do other parts, tag photos correctly etc, but I find it all a bit overwhelming, so I start where I can. Thank you for the great work you do.

Thanks Tom, I had no idea how inaccessible my site is, something to think about for my next round of tech work

Hi Tom,

Thanks for helping me out to make my website more accessible.

Tom,

Thanks for the questions. Would you say there are a set of 'must-haves' to do to make your site more accessible. Doing the must-haves may have a 80% impact and not take too much cost.

Does that make sense?

Andrew

Hi Tom,

Thanks for the questions. But, funny I think my website is accessible enough so I would leave everything around the judging when you visit miee. :) Well, thanks for my programmer who does all the "accessibility support" for me until now that makes my website easy to follow through all occasions.

Good day!

Tyrone

Hello Tom,

That's a long list, thank you. I can see many faults on my site, so this is a great help for me to start improving.

but at least i have no flashing adverts or horrible white text on black: never liked any of these so i doubt my readers would.

I guess I need to start with a subscription to your news letter. The list seems comprehensive until I read your warning. You seem to want us to be proactive on this issue. Until I read your work I had not thought about it. For me this post is discouraging. It pushes me away from trying because I could go through that huge list, use lots of time and money and energy and fail.

I use wordpress and templates I pay developers for. I can do some tweaks myself but it is a challenge to make a site for those who are not disabled. What is the first thing to do, the thing that will make my site more friendly to the disabled?

Hi Michelle,
You have several options to make your videos accessible. I certainly understand the associated costs, and especially for small businesses, it is obvious that it won't be priority #1. But there are some things you can do. For example, if you find captioning expensive, you can transcribe your videos. I wrote a piece about it recently:
providing transcription
Also, YouTube automatically captions your videos. Well, as good as it gets. But it's free, and you can make corrections. I also discussed this recently at: captioning a Youtube video

One thing to consider as well is that transcription does not only help people with disabilities, but adds lots of information for search engines to find. Just imagine how much more content you will have after transcribing an hour worth of videos.

Also, we provide transcription and captioning services at a reasonable cost if I can help you with that.

Andrew,
There are certainly priorities to consider when you build or modify the site. I can already hear the uproar and getting ready to be stoned, because ideally we should make a site fully accessible. But let's face it, something is better than nothing.
Besides, there are a couple of small things you can do and make a huge difference, call it the 80 20 rule if you wish.

So, things you can do immediately and easily on your blog:
Don't start playing videos automatically
Provide text alternative for audio information.
Describe images which have a functional meaning and contribute to understanding your post.
Don't use colors only for functionality: when you say red fields are required, also put a star into the field label, now you can make it red because there's an alternative.
But most importantly, don't hide your site's functionality behind visual CAPTCHA. This is the image which displays a set of characters to verify that you are a human. You can have a hundred percent accessible site, but with the visual CAPTCHA you have effectively locked out blind people. Instead, use a text based one, challenge questions, math solutions, type a certain word, etc.
Also, make sure your site is easy to navigate, use headings where appropriate.
These will make a huge difference on a site.
I have checked your blog, and you are already doing much of it.

Thanks for coming back to me, Tom and I appreciate you having a look at my site.

Andrew

Hi Tom,

This is a realy useful list - and also tough to read, as it highlights how much work I have to get my site up to scratch! It's interesting - we all spend a lot of time on our sites, making them informative and useful if we can, but accessibility according to guidelines is something which tends to slip the net. I'm going to do what I can to enhance my site to make it comply with online recommendations for accessibility. It's good to have a checklist, and also the reminder to act on it!

Jen

Boy, I had know idea of all the things that I still need to learn. I feel like I haven't even left first base yet. Not sure I have even hit the ball hard enough to get on first base. Anyway thanks for letting me know how much there still is to learn. I am only hoping that some day before the lights go out I can figure this out with the help of people like you.
Thanks Tom and you have wonderful day.
Debbie

Hi Tyrone,

Yes, I agree, your site is very accessible. The major difficulty I find is playing the videos, unfortunately these days most Flash embedded videos don't display accessible buttons. The good news is that screen reader users learned to work with it. Push the first button to start playing, the rest might be less obvious.

Excellent list Tom. I think a lot of these apply to general good site design and functionality, not just so it's accessible. Some of them are pretty technical and I can imagine a lot of people don't even know what some of the items mean, but hopefully their web people do!

Dear Tom -

This was a massive wake up. I have printed it out and will study to see what I can do to make my blog more accessible.

When I was in the travel business, I was one of the few agents listed who would help disabled people travel.

It was hard then before all the laws that took effect later. Especially airlines were not too helpful - but it was worth it.

I once sent a woman in a wheelchair on an around the world trip. Fortunately,she had wealth so it was just a matter of making a lot of arrangements for her to be met everywhere, finding hotels that were accessible etc.

A complicated booking. But it was an extraordinary priveledge.

She was booked to go to Israel when the Yom Kippor war started. She was fearless. Wanted to go anyway. Of course that was one she missed.

I have to get back in the saddle again here.

I'll be honest, I've never really thought there was so much to consider when it comes to making sure your web site is fully accessible.

Thanks for the eye-opener!

Krizia

... just take the first step" (I think MLK Jr said). To make one's websites accessible, in view of your eye-opening checklist, can be prohibitive, time and money wise. But to keep it in mind and be guided by it and implement a step a time will surely make a difference. It's never too late to make a new year's resolution, is it? :-)
Beat

What an eye-opener, Tom! I have not ever considered that my site set-up may not be accessible to everyone. I clearly have a lot of work to do, and hopefully, that work will lead to more hits and sales. Thanks for such a great post!

Beat,
You are correct. The list I put together targets many people. Very technical developers, and private bloggers at the same time. Depending on your everyday tasks, and your technical knowledge, you can take anything that fits into your work.
I truly believe if you just pick one item and implement it from now on, it will make a huge difference. And maybe in some time, take another one.

Tom
I can echo many of the comments above regarding reflecting on my own site and "how to". But another strand is how complex we make the language we use. I've recently started using Scribe, which seeks to help with search engine optimisation (avoiding jargon!), and within that says how difficult the language you use is to understand. I was quite shocked to find it found most of my posts "difficult"!

Linked to this is using jargon, abbreviations and country specific references; for instance this sentence has no meaning to me "The questions mostly follow the structure of WCAG 2.0, but they also ensure that they address the most frequent Section 508 non-compliance issues as well."
David

David,

You have a point that won't have an answer. The complexity of language is very very personal. For example, I just effectively locked out people from this site who don't speak English. Maybe I also did others who are just learning English. Is it accessibility? Sure it is. But if I start putting out posts concerning everybody, I will get stuck at the first one.

And it is also not that simple when you establish that we will assume English speaking people with a certain level of education, just remember your classrooms, some finish it with an A and some with an F, and not to mention cognitive disabilities.

So, while automated tools can be pretty helpful giving you an idea of how difficult your text is, just try to put something together that's all easy to read, most likely you won't get too far, or in reality people will think your site is too simplistic. So, I would use the tools, because they help you find complex sentences and jargon, but I would add common sense.

Another important factor is your audience, and this gets us to your question.

You certainly have to write to your site's audience, and what maybe a jargon for some, it is usual for others. So, the sentence you refer to, I totally agree, for an average educated English speaker it does not make any sense. However, many of the people come to this site to find information specific to WCAG and Section 508, which are in simple words, accessibility standards and guidelines. So, if I just throw a bunch of questions together it maybe helpful to some, but people won't necessarily see that I'm trying to solve their problems by providing a quick checklist that they can apply to most of their WCAG and Section 508 work.

When it comes to accessibility, you have to work with the technical, and non-technical audience. So, to balance this out a little, I have some articles on this site which explain some of these terms in more simple words.

Also, this post just happens to be one of those unfortunate ones, which talks to everybody, take what you understand from it, the rest is probably not relevant. The reason is that I wanted to collect the most important questions at one place.

So, I don't really have a good answer for you, other than try to include as many people you can. And the same goes with people with disabilities. If you ask me, you will never be able to create a site that all people with disabilities can use, because it is just impossible. Just consider those people who have a disability but they never learned to use the computer. You can make it as painless as possible if they can't start their browser. But this applies to people without disabilities. Also, you have certain disabilities which make it practically impossible to communicate with the computer. The range of these disabilities is smaller given the new inventions, but there are still people who are locked out. So, all you can do is to make sure it works well for the majority of people, including those with disabilities.

Tom I'm so glad that you're here to push us towards accessibility. At the same time, wow, that's a huge list! I'm going to have to work through it one item at a time. I like what Beat said about taking one step at a time.

Tom - you listed many great tips that apply not only to accessibility for the blind or hearing impaired, but also to a large number of standard website visitors. The challenge is combining some of your tips with the creative side of web design.

Tom,

I read through your list and find I have a lot more work to do! Wow, just when you think you've got it down, there are whole sections of the population you didn't think about.

Thanks,
Sherri

Sherri,
I agree that all this information can be overwhelming. However, throughout my consulting experience I find that many of the accessibility guidelines do not apply to all sites. For example, if you don't display videos on your site, you don't need to worry about many things. Usually when it comes down to what is applicable to a particular site, it becomes much more manageable.