Designing for Accessibility As members of an institution of higher education providing information, it is important for providers to remember that there are Internet users who may have special requirements to access our information. This text is meant to be an introduction to making your pages accessible to everyone. Further information on general accessibility issues may be found on All Things Web (an excellent resource for other design issues, as well)
It's the Internet... I thought everyone could access the information! Theoretically, everyone can. However, if your page design discourages them, they won't. Some examples of page design elements which discourage users: Tiny-sized pink text on a black background will irritate almost everyone if they have to stare at it long enough, but it will especially discourage people with visual disabilities. Using color to indicate difference will be lost on people with color blindness. Text contained in images cannot be read by browsers which read text aloud to a blind user. High bandwidth content (large graphics, digital audio or video) on a home page is enticing to some users, but may discourage others from waiting the several minutes it will take to download the page. Older computers cannot the support the latest browser versions, and therefore may not be able to process Javascript commands or content which requires plugins. Accessibility is a spectrum, not a set of answers. As in any published material, you make the final decisions of who your audience is, and how you are going to appeal to that audience. If you would like to widen that audience, then consider these strategies for making pages more accessible. Use text as the main method of presenting content. All images should have alt text which describes the image and how the image is used in the page. Use multiple navigation methods, including text-based navigation. Navigation which seems intuitive to you can be a mystery to someone else. Text size and color should be readable on a variety of platforms and screen resolutions. Links should be large enough so that they are easy to hit with a cursor, even for those with mobility problems. Write out the address of your links, especially the ones which reference non-Wellesley sites, so that if your pages are printed the links can be seen. Spell out your dates, instead of using numerals. (September 15, 1998 or Sept. 15, 1998 as opposed to 09/15/98.) Many other countries use day/month/year instead of the common American usage (month/day/year). Since your pages could be accessed anywhere in the world, a date such as 5/4/02 could get confusing. Lower your file sizes, especially of graphics. Colors should be chosen to add to the page, not detract or complicate needlessly. If you use client-side scripting, such as Javascript or Java applets, hide your script from older browsers or use browser detection so that the page functions without the script. If you use frames, use the <noframes> tag to make the content available to browsers without frames. If a frame contains navigational elements, duplicate these elements in the body of the page so that if someone links to an isolated page of content, instead of the frameset, they can still navigate your site. Design should support content, not content suffer from design. Text and Color: Test pages in both a text-only program such as lynx and on a monitor set to minimal color levels (black and white, or 16 colors). Pay attention to how easy it is to navigate pages, whether the color combinations may cause problems, and whether user-set browser overrides of page colors may cause problems. Mobility: Try navigating your site using a mouse in your non-dominant hand. Computer: Check download times. Dreamweaver guesses the download time for you page in the lower right corner of its editing window (e.g. 28K/8 sec). Actual times vary widely, but you may be interested in the possible range: from 24,400 baud modems to a T3 connection (Wellesley has a fractional T3). If you design on a PC, check the pages on a Mac, and vice-versa. Check your pages on different screen resolutions, especially the lowest common resolution (640x480) and the highest common resolution (1024x768). Browsers were designed to be infinitely customizable to each user. A user may override your color scheme, your font choice, your font size, and your use of images. If any of these elements are crucial to your page design, then your message has been lost to users who have customized their browser. Browsers
process html codes differently. You should test your
content in the most common browsers: Internet Explorer, Safari,
and Firefox. The sites below approximate how a page will
look in a given browser, but to be entirely certain, pages should
be opened in the browser itself: WebXACT is a free online service that lets you test single pages of web content for quality, accessibility, and privacy issues. WebXACT is located at http://webxact.watchfire.com Vischeck allows you to simulate how the world looks to people with various sorts of color deficiency. Visit Vischeck at http://www.vischeck.com/index.php The Wave helps you to analyze the logical structure of your site. A project of the Pennsylvania Initiative on Assistive Technology, the web site is found at http://www.temple.edu/inst_disabilities/piat/wave/ WebABLE is a repository of information about accessibility issues on the web. WebABLE is at http://www.webable.com The government Center for Information Technology Accommodation site has details on policies as well as how-to advice. CITA is at http://www.itpolicy.gsa.gov/cita/ Section 508 of the Federal Acquisition Regulations requires that Federal agencies electronic and information technology is accessible to people with disabilities. Guidelines and resources for section 508 compliance are found at http://www.section508.gov The National Center for Accessible Media at WGBH in Boston has a web access project which researches accessibility solutions for the web, especially for multimedia. The Web Access Project is found at http://ncam.wgbh.org/index.html Recent projects include MAGpie, a free tool for inserting captions in multimedia presentations Yahoo's
Accessibility directory is located at: http://dir.yahoo.com/Arts/Design_Arts/Graphic_Design/ The W3C, or World Wide Web Consortium, a web standards organization, offers may accessibility guidelines and resources through its Web Accessibility Initiative at http://www.w3.org/WAI/ Transmission statistics for www.wellesley.edu can be found at http://www.wellesley.edu/Stats/WWWSTAT/ Statistics are compiled weekly. Scrolling down to the heading Total Transfers from each Archive Section shows the number of requests made for a specific URL -- an html page, an image, a form, a video clip, etc. The number may not be absolutely accurate, but may be useful when making comparisons to other pages or graphics in the site, especially over time. The college webmaster has other data showing most used content across the whole web site. If you don't find the data you want, or to discuss the best use of the WWWStat data, please feel free to contact the webmaster.
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