Design Issues with accessibility

Text

To meet the W3C standards, text must be resizable using your browser controls in order to cater for the partially sighted. This may be an issue when you have backgrounds in table cells or when you are dependent on text fitting into a specific table cell height.

There will also be issues when CSS is turned off, another requirement of the W3C we need to meet to make a site accessible. The problems will be the same as above and they may compromise a design. Please let the Creative Team know prior to them beginning if you would like the site to be accessible.

When writing copy for links, make sure the link itself is descriptive. This is because screen readers are able to list the links on a page. So if you had ten links that all said Click here, the disabled user will not be able to distinguish what each link is for when the screen reader list them all one after the other. The best way to do it is to make your actual link the description.

The Disabled user experience

When a disabled user goes to each page, the screen reader reads the page aloud from left to right and downwards. When you work on a site down to 3rd level navigation and beyond, there may be a large amount of links accumulating at the top of the page. Take this page at Orange for example.

The 2nd level navigation is at the top menu the entire time, this means you have to listen to every choice when the page loads. When you actually go to any of the pages in each section, the same 2nd level navigation is mentioned again at the left column. This is fine when you can see the page, but this may confuse the blind user.

A better example is the BBC website, well documented for catering to the disabled. Take the news section for example. This has only first level navigation featured at the top. When you click within a new section, the 2nd level navigation appears at the left of the page. All links that aren't going to be clicked that often that you want to hear them every time are located at the bottom of the page.

If the menu needs to be at the top and there is no way around this, then we can add a skip navigation button, which doesn't have to appear on the screen and will only be picked up by the relevant software. Please talk to your development team about this.

Bread crumb trails can make things easier to follow also.

Colour usage

Using colour to convey information is not accessible for a range of disabled users. For example, if you had a list of green and red coloured links with a caption at the top saying "all green links display latest news" it wouldn't make sense if you can't see it.

For people who are colour blind or short sighted, using colours such as blue text on a blue background can be difficult to see. There is no clear cut right or wrong here, but it is something worth considering when you are designing a web page.