pretending to be the blind guy/does it work?
So you are a web designer and you like your work. You have the drive to improve yourself so you do some reading about web design. You find out there are blind people surfing the web and after the initial giggle you start to realize this is actually serious business. You continue reading about screen reader software and html source order. After a while you are hooked and want to put these things in practice. But then what ...
the initial phase
Accessibility on the web is often targeted at catering for people with a visual disability. While this is only a limited portion of our work, it has become a solid stereotype to explain accessibility to the outside world. It took me a while to get the hang of it, to be honest, but the fact that it lead to purer design and better understanding of html helped me a lot to adapt to it.
I think the biggest problem for people like me (and many others in similar situations) is the lack of thorough understanding of the problems visually disabled people (and many other disabled people) are facing when they are surfing the web. Of course you can read up on it a little, but most of the time I simply reverted to what I presumed was common logic and pretended to be the blind guy myself. Needless to say, this is not an ideal method of working.
Even though you can try to predict how you would react when you were unable to see a web page with your own eyes, blind people are actually used to working their way through things without being able to see. It is hard to fully understand how this would be, how they face things and what methods they have developed to overcome their disabilities.
common problems
One of the things that got me doubting my way of working was the place of navigation in a html document. I read a lot about it, but even among screen reader users there didn't seem to be a real consensus of where to put it. Some said is was nicer to have in front of the content, some preferred to have if after the content. If you take the problem on rationally, both solutions have pros and cons, both can work equally well, according to the context.
Similar issues arose when dealing with alt text (though I'll leave those issues for an upcoming article). Bottom line is that it's not always clear what solution would be best. And in the end, there is no "blind person", only a group of people with the same disability who all have their own quirks and preferences, just like any other.
what's missing
Of course you can buy or download your own screen reader, close your eyes for 5 hours straight and try to empathize with the people you're going through all this trouble for, but that still won't lead you to all the right answers.
What I'm missing is a place to gather information about problems like these on a first-hand basis. It struck me as weird that there is no central forum where visually disabled people, or people with other disabilities, gather to discuss the problems they are facing. And where people like us can go to gather information if we have questions or worries about the code we are writing. Maybe I just missed it, but I never came across a place like this.
If you know of a place like this on the net, feel free to tell me where to find it. If you feel the drive to start one up, please do so. I'm sure it would help a lot in creating a better understanding among web developers who are in no direct contact with the people they're actively trying to help.
Get in touch with the National Federation of the Blind: http://www.nfb.org/nfb/default.asp?SnID=339592259. They recently gave a great talk at my university.
I think what you really want is the opportunity to do usability testing of your website with users with difference disabilities. It would be great if there was a group of such people sitting around waiting for us to call them up so they can provide feedback to us, but in reality, like with any other group of usability participants, you will probably just have to organise them yourselves and pay them for their time and help.
Organisations such as the National Federation of the Blind would probably be a starting point to find such participants, but then you need to organise a time and place to meet with them and pay them an incentive for their assistance.
There isn't a single central place. Given this is the /web/, perhaps that's not so surprising - there's no single central place for web developers either! But there are lots of more specific forums and mailing lists where people with disabilities exchange problems and solutions, and that are open to developer questions. For example, there are multiple mailing lists for users of the JAWS screen reader. I listed some of these forums and mailing lists in an article on accessibility testing, as a port of call when seeking feedback or recruiting testers. Perhaps a particularly interesting example for web developers in the Blind Webbers Yahoo! Group, which is a support group for web authors with visual disabilities.
There are some good mailing lists specifically about visual impairment at accesswatch.info
If one were to start up such a site, it really shouldn't just concentrate on screen readers. I don't think it's as constructive as it could be to characterise accessibility as 'the blind guy' thing; it inadvertently discourages one from thinking about other accessibility problems.
I was (have been) asking myself the same question(s), fortunatelly I stumbled across a great book about overall and local (my country-related) accessibility. It helped me to gain some insight into some questions I'd had. I can't really suggest you this book as you can't speak my language, but you might want to check out some book stores in your own country (OR you can ask a community to give you a tip).
There are a few obvious things to include within an accessible web design, e.g. everything that needs a text alternative should have one, link text should be understandable when taken out of context, navigation should be consistent, 10 links is better than 100, and so on, but there is no substitute for getting someone who uses screen reader software or a braille reader on a regular basis to do accessibility testing. In some ways, a sighted user testing using screen reader software is a bit like someone who hasn't learnt to drive testing a car, they may be able to understand the basics and find obvious problems but the day to day usage is what really counts.
Many thanks for the interesting links, I'll be looking into them for sure.
As for finding and paying usability testers, I think there should be a better way. Like someone mentioned earlier, this is the /web/. A lot of things happen for free, I'm not really looking for site reviews either, just answers to common problems.
As for contacting instances, I'd prefer getting first-hand info. I'm not questioning their authority or good intentions, but like I explained in the article already, it's nicer to get a wide range of opinions. Those instances often have one voice and one voice only.
If only it were that easy. The whole issue is related to finding out what does need and what doesn't need a text alternative as a designer who is not experiencing the disabilities some of his user have.
Web-accessability died last year. It was sadly just a quick fad like crocs. At least judging from the miniscule percentage of sites of importance actually caring for this.
Too bad you can't have webpages for blind people because the monitors aren't rough enough to provide them with a touchable enough surface. :3
Actually, more and more lawsuits are being filed (and won), more and more governments are bound to accessibility standards and the Opera crew recently released some very interesting numbers about rising site validation (not the same as accessibility, but still).
Still a long way to go, I'll grant you dead. But everything but a fad ...
Governments, yes, companies, no. I do believe the private market takes roughly 99% of the traffic generated on the interwebs. Unless something dramatical happens and we continue like we do I don't think we'll see a sustainable usability growth before 2010 or possibly even 2015.
It's not only the government. Big online stores are being targeted too (and lawsuits are being won). I'm not saying the web will be perfect in a year, but there's growth and I believe it will continue to do so in the next couple of years.
It's always better to be ahead of the game.
There is one general law that you can easily follow: If your website is fully accessible using only your keyboard, it should be accessible to many other assistive technologies as well. For this purpose you can create a three or four skip-links (linked to accesskeys 1, 2, 3 ...). Try browsing your website with styles off, try using a text browser like Lynx and you'll see that skipping through large ul li trees can give you a headache (just as too much content in your header). Try using your website with everything on (styles, js, cookies...) with keyboard only to see if you can use it.
If you use a header that's before the content in the source code, provide a "Skip to content" link. If your h1 with content is first, provide "Skip to navigation" link or "Skip to secondary content" link. If you have a large ul-li tree in the middle of your code, you can put a "Skip tree link" before it to jump right after it. At the bottom you can have a "Skip to top" link too.
I've done some testing with it and it works OK, but if it really is accessible, smeg knows...
We have drawn together a group of visually-impaired staff members that we use internally to raise awareness and assist us in designing appropriately for them and for customers.
It is useful not only for web documents but also for our print publications, to help us in the selection of appropriate colour contrasts (for readability and for colour-blind people), text size and density.
The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has a lot of great information about how people with a variety of disabilities use the web, and techniques for implementing the WCAG built into the standards. Other good starting points are WebAim, Gez Lemon's Juicy Studio - they'll lead to a whole network of sites by people who aim to make their sites accessible to all.
For technical testing, get the Web Accessibility Toolbar. You can download it from many sites, but here's one: http://www.visionaustralia.org.au/ais/toolbar/
But there's nothing like seeing real people using your site, and that means usability testing with people with disabilities.
If you are looking for an immersive experience to get started, Access U (May 11-12, Austin, Texas) has tons of great technical sessions and a track on usability. www.knowbility.org/conference
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