2. Accessibility != Blind
1. Visual impairment
• Blind, colour-blind
2. Audio impairment
• Deaf, hard of hearing
3. Mobility impairment
• Restricted or impaired movement of hands, head etc
4. Learning difficulties
5. Other mental health considerations
• See the Mental Capacity Act 2005 for a better explanation
6. Colour blind
• It’s a Male gene thing – Women have gotten off lightly
• Different types of colour blindness, some more
common than others
• Effects 8% of the male population
• Roughly 1 in 25 people looking at our websites
8. Google analytics
Orange and
green look same
What you typically see if you’re colour-blind
From wearecolorblind.com
9. Let’s look at that statistic again
• 1 in 25 people looking at our websites are colour-blind
• Which means that last month, approximately:
• 13,000 colour-blind people looked at Trans-Pennine Express
• 11,000 colour-blind people looked at Travis Perkins
• 5200 colour-blind people looked at Late Deals
• This is not a minor issue
13. Some key take-outs
• Greens, reds, oranges and blues are virtually
indistinguishable
• It’s not safe to rely on colour and contrast levels to
distinguish content
• Whenever possible use shape as well as colour as a
differentiator
19. Blindness
• 1 in 5 people likely to have some form of visual accessibility
issue
• Blind people look to buy stuff on internet just like everyone
else
• Not always practical to go high street shopping
• They need and want to spend money like everyone else
• eCommerce in own home allows them to use their own assistive
devices and shop at their own speed
• Estimated potential spend of £80m a year
• This is a big potential audience
• It’s also a big missed opportunity for eTailers failing to provide
accessible browsing & purchasing options
20. Ignore at your peril
• Equalities act 2010 bans “unfair treatment of people because of
protected characteristics they have”
• Age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership,
pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, sexual
orientation
• Disney class action lawsuit in USA
• Settled out of court so they didn’t have to fix the issues
• RNIB now suing them in the UK
• RNIB also suing BMI Baby
• Target sued in USA for about $10m
22. Screen readers
• Screen reader software “reads” aloud what’s on the screen
• JAWS is the most common screen reader
• 75% market share
• Works on desktop applications and websites
• Has several “helper” features integrated into IE to make browsing
easier
• However…
23. JAWS
• JAWS is expensive
• It’s a big investment/initial purchase
• The price puts people off updating What the hell???
• Lots of people still using older versions
From freedomscientific.com
24. JAWS
• Version 7
• was the first to work with Windows XP
• was the first version to receive mass adoption
• still has very large user base
• Version 13 is the latest
• works with Vista and Windows 7
• can just about cope with very basic inline updates
• limited user base at present time
25. How do people use JAWS?
• Pages are scanned, not read
1. Page loads and screen reader reads out the <TITLE> tag
• Hence meaningful titles are critical
2. While they’re navigating people will use a Link List
• A popup window that lists all inks on a page
3. Once they think they are on right page people will use a List of Headings
• A popup that lists all the <H?> tags on a page, along with their heading level
• Think of it like a simplified “document outline”
4. Once an appropriate heading has been found, screen reader will read out
the content under that heading
• Advanced users speed up the voice to make page scanning faster
26. JAWS Link list
<a href=“#”>Link Text</a>
From jimthatcher.com
28. Common accessibility errors
• Text alternatives – A
• Use alt tags for significant/relevent images
• Not for spacer images!
• Intelligent use of, not over used otherwise it's gibberish
• Form labels and input fields – A
• Form layouts require fieldsets and legends to make sense
• eg: radio buttons – lots of yes/no options & no connected question
• HTML Lang(uage) of page – A
• specify its English so screen readers get right pronunciations
• JAWS has automatic language detection – JAWS has an accent!
• Link/anchor text – A
• “click here” & “find out more” are evil – remember the link list?
• Anchor text should contain descriptive copy
• Eg: “More about our accommodation”
• Link “title” attributes clash with link text – link text is preferred
29. JAWS Link list
What the hell???
From standards-schmandards.com
30. More common accessibility errors
• Page titles – A
• First thing screen reader says and invaluable for orientation
• Should state page name, section name, and site name
• Tables for layouts rather than tabular data – A
• If it’s not tabular data, tables are bad, mmmmm, okay?
• Reader says "table with x columns and x rows”
• If you MUST display other content in a table add summaries to
explain what the table is about – sets expectations re: jumbled
content, or allows the user to skip past it completely
• Headings – AAA
• H1 and H2 quite common but not always used correctly
• Non-visually impaired users derive structure from colour and font
size but visually impaired users need semantic mark-up
• Vital to give sense of structure to page
31. Some key take-outs
• If screen reader can’t see it, blind users can’t either
• Semantic mark-up, effective copywriting and well structured
documents are vital
• Helps orientation, page scanning and content location
• Front-load paragraphs so can tell meaning from first few words
• Forms should use field sets and label tags to group questions and
answers together semantically
• DOM updates not detected by most popular screen readers
• Screen Reader tech lags far behind standard browser tech
• AAA links to change font size are pointless
• Visually impaired users know how to change the font size!!
• Box ticking exercise
• Actually a hindrance – first thing screen readers says is “ay-ay-ay” –
makes website sounds like a deranged Scouser
32. And some other interesting points
• “Skip to content” vs “Skip to navigation”
• Why should every page have a skip to content link?
• Why not make the content first and have a skip to navigation?
• Screen readers can bypass all this anyway and bring up a Link Lists
• Automatically playing videos drown out screen reader
• If videos are Flash screen reader cannot stop or mute the video
• If videos are HTML5 screen reader probably can’t display it (yet)
• Traps the user on the page as they cant hear the Link List to navigate off the page
• And imagine the further horror if the video loops indefinitely!!
• Flash sites and loading pages are the devil…
• Reader cannot detect any content - utter silence and no way off the page
• “dot dot dot” is a really annoying convention
• See “ay-ay-ay” L
• JAWS identifies itself as Internet Explorer
• Querying User Agent is pointless
36. Potentially easy fixes
• Content hierarchy, page layout & structure
• Meaningful page titles
• Relevant headings – even on the homepage
• Linear content-grouping so page can be scanned
• Sensible use of image alt tags
• Sensible use of link anchor text
• How do we make all this fool-proof so clients using a CMS can’t
break all our carefully planned content?
37. The trickier issues
• Lack of triggers for DOM updates – how do we handle:
• Inline add to basket?
• Images & galleries in lightboxes?
• Login boxes as overlays?
• Smart/autocomplete search boxes
• Calendar & date picker controls
• How do we provide a rich, interactive and engaging experience for
non-visually impaired users while still making it a serviceable and
usable experience for visually impaired users?
38. The end
Thanks for listening J
A big thank you to Clare Davidson from SimpleUsability and
Barry Hill for an inspired talk on Accessibility In Practice; to
Northern User Experience (Leeds chapter) for hosting the
aforementioned talk; and to everyone who’s examples I have
pilfered (with credits) in this presentation.