Benjawi.

Accessibility has always been a huge topic of discussion when talking about web design, even though when Berners-Lee created the Web, it was part of his original vision. It isn't about people with disabilities like many people seem to think it is. Accessibility is about people being able to get all of the information that they can out of the pages that they are looking at.

Web designers see accessibility in many different forms. To some, it is just adding alt tags to images. Others consider it to be an afterthought and so it doesn't get embedded into sites properly, and there are others that see it in completely different ways.

What many people don't seem to realise though is that accessibility is important to the creation of websites and also for the long-term vision to have well constructed websites. Despite people's views on how important accessibility is, many organisations and companies are left with no choice but to comply with having an accessible site and following guidelines set by legislation actions around the world.

The web was designed for everyone. If you don't have a mouse connected to your PC, you should still be able to navigate through a site. Even if you are completely blind, you should still be able to get all the information you want out of a page. The web was explicitly designed so that this could be done without any problems. Everyone when looking at a site should be able to reach, perceive, operate and understand the content that is being displayed to the screen.

Accessibility isn't just for the blind or disabled, and this is a common mistake to make when thinking about accessibility. Having an accessible site does help blind people see your site and disabled people navigate around the page, but having a fully accessible site can increase its overall usability dramatically. A lot of the work done in making your site accessible is related to providing accessible access for people who are blind or partially sighted, and it is because of this that it is sometimes viewed as only being for the blind.

Sites that are going to be designed as accessible are often thought of as a dull and boring site, and this is a myth that comes from the olden days of web design. It was thought that sites that are designed to be completely accessible might not look as nice as sites that use lots of fancy images everywhere for titles and sometimes even to replace the main body of text, but if designed correctly are certainly not dull or boring. The reason that most sites that focused on accessibility in the past were viewed this way was because of the limitations of accessibility, and because of the amount of time and resources that companies were putting into it. The use of such things as stylesheets can now make accessible sites look good though, and when more sites become accessible the myth that accessibility makes sites look dull and boring should fade and this has already started to become evident.

"The facts state that there are some 8.5 million people in the UK who have some form of disability. The RNIB esti-mate that a further 2 million have some sort of sight problem, ranging from mild to severe. This figure does not even include other groups with accessibility needs such as colour blindness, epilepsy, mobility problems, dyslexia or low literacy.

"If you think about it, almost everyone faces some sort of disability at some point in his or her life. For example, a broken wrist would limit your ability to use a mouse, and a headache would lower your tolerance of flickering images and poorly contrasted colours."
rnib.org.uk

As the above quote shows, a large amount of people in the UK alone have some form of disability. One that I have seen particularly ignored is colour blindness. I know someone who can't tell the difference between green and blue as well as a few other colours. Poorly contrasted colours make sites very difficult to use if you're colour blind and can lost you a few users, and with how competitive the Internet has become no one can really afford to lose users over such avoidable things.

All of the big legal cases involving accessibility of a website have all so far come from America and involve the ADA (Americas with Disability Act). In November 1999, the NFB (National Federation of the Blind) filed a lawsuit against AOL, saying that AOL’s browser and website were inaccessible to consumers who are blind. The complaint claimed that screen readers were encountering problems and barriers to AOL services because of the site having unlabeled graphics, keyboard commands that had to be activated through a mouse, customised graphical controls and channels hidden within unlabeled graphics.

The big thing about this case is that one of the main things that let AOL down is their use of unlabeled graphics, which they usually use for a few links at the top of their site. Yet adding an alt attribute to graphics is the most commonly known accessibility feature. Another main problem that the site gave to blind people was that AOL had an inaccessible sign-up form. The form was inaccessible because it was not designed to inform the user what information was meant to go into each blank field and this is something that some people still miss out to this day. You can usually tell when this isn't the case when you have forms autofill and nothing get's autofilled.

At one point the thing to do on the web was to have a site designed in Flash. Flash was designed for interactive elements and therefore it is the platform of choice for things like games. It wasn’t designed with accessibility in mind, yet people still started designing websites with it because of the effects and interaction that it could perform. There were many problems with this including the fact that you couldn’t use your browsers back button without leaving the site, and that you would have to wait a while depending on the site, for it to load along with the effects which usually takes a lot longer than waiting for a HTML page to load. But there was also a huge accessibility issue with Flash as a lot of people could not use it at all. But due to Flash becoming such a big thing on the Internet, Macromedia started to include accessibility features into Flash 6 while working in co-operation with some developers of screen readers and they have been working on improving accessibility in all versions since.

Right now, with the advancement of the Internet, how we can use HTML and CSS, accessibility can be incorporated easily while still having a beautiful website. It's been like this for a long time, design just took center stage for a while. I don't know why it bothers me so much, maybe it's because I looked into it so much at University. Maybe it's because I like my forms filling themselves in at times and going to the next logical box when I press Tab. Or maybe it's because I know of people who are colour blind, dyslexic or have sight problems. Why should they get less enjoyment out of the Internet than I do? Accessibility is a big thing, yet it takes little to implement it right.