This morning I had a look back at the BBC’s accessibility website and there was this link under ‘Accessibility News’: “Disabled people favour accessible websites“.
Talk about stating the blindingly (no pun intended) obvious.
Clicking the link led to a piece about some research carried out by AbilityNet (the people who work with the BBC on their accessibility site) giving an overview of a survey done that shows disabled people prefer websites they can actually read/listen to.
It’s obviously meant to be there as an encouragement for more developers (and clients) to realise that they need to account for accessibility in their websites, but the equivalent of a title saying “Footballers prefer to use round footballs than rugby balls when playing football”, or “Number one single quite popular” just makes it look silly.
On a more serious note, it’s interesting to note the percentage differences in accessibility of different types of website (e.g. they cite newspaper sites among the worst for accessibility, followed by shopping sites). While I’m dubious on how they give percentage ratings for something as intangible as accessibility (once you’re past the obvious code semantics and validity), it would be good to look further into the reasons for the differences in accessibility of certain types of website.
There are obvious reasons for some, such as newspaper sites being packed with a lot of content on every page that’s managed by hundreds of people where the potential for introducing glitches and accessibility no-nos is high, or shopping websites where there’s more interactivity required based usually on out-of-the-box software that’s stuck in old coding standards. I also have no doubt that aside from the problems of accessible code, the process of viewing/reading/being read a website has a huge bearing on the perceived accessibility and this is where things like code semantics and content order come into play.
37signals’ love of ‘less’ would probably help out someone viewing a website via screen reader or even those who just have poor eyesight and need the text a bit bigger: if some data isn’t necessary on every page, why is it there? Lose it. It only gets in the way and as you move across the spectrum to people with more severe disabilities, all that extraneous data gets more and more in the way, detracting further from the user experience and accessibility.
The problem with data clutter is that it’s often due to no-one having come up with a decent way of making data quickly availableto the user that sits on the borderline of ‘necessary’. One example is having a login form on every page of a site until you log in, then showing some logged-in data along the lines of “Welcome, Adam Perfect. You last logged in 3 days ago. You have 2 new messages….” once you are logged in. There’s a case to be made that the login form at least is useful to have on each page as a quick way to log in once you’re ready, but it’s not necessary for all the people who have no intention of signing up, let alone logging in.
Users would probably get along quite happily not having this stuff on the periphery of the content they’re trying to read as long as it’s very quickly available if they do decide they want to log in or see who’s online at the same time as them, or utilise any of the other data that they’re used to appearing on other websites.
AJAX is a nifty solution for able users, where you could have a ‘Quick Links’ button somewhere that can dynamically load in the extras either on mouse-over or with a click, but I’m pretty sure screen reader users would be stuffed at that point. It’s of course good practice to build in ’standard’ back-up routes to AJAX features for people who have JavaScript turned off, but then you’re making them load an extra page just to get a list of links or options. When research shows that desired information should be no more than a couple of clicks away at any time, requiring a whole page load just to show the options is a price you probably can’t afford to pay.
So after all that, you’d think I’d have a clever solution. Alas, it’s still morning and my brain isn’t up to it just yet, but I wanted to have a bit of a rant about the immaturity of web user interfaces in terms of accessibility as well as usability. A lot more thought needs to be done on how we can cater to the infinitely-sliding scale of our users without losing the quality of content for any of them as old techniques like separate, rarely-updated, text-only versions of websites used to do. A big ask methinks.
