Visicog

In this week’s lecture, we’ll be talking about accessibility. Accessibility, in the context of usability, refers to how easy (or hard) a site is to use by all people, with a particular focus on people who have visual, motor, or cognitive disabilities. In the past year, there have been some major advances in this realm, especially with the introduction of roles from the WAI-ARIA (”Web Accessibility Initiative-Accessible Rich Internet Application”) working group.

This is a huge benefit for people with vision loss who use screen readers such as JAWS to use web sites. Websites can now be marked up so that common areas (such as search, navigation, main content, etc), can be clearly marked to the screen reader. That means, a user can easily jump to specific areas of the screen without having to have the entire page read to them first. For instance, if you were on a newspaper article page and were using a screen reader, you wouldn’t want to have the entire navigation, ads, and links read to you before you finally get to the content. By clearly marking up parts of the page in the code, you’ve greatly improved usability for those folks using screen readers.

Also of note, is a recent survey sent out to users of screen readers from webaim.org. Quoting from the results of the survey:

• 75% of those surveyed did not have JavaScript enabled in their browser
• CAPTCHA, Flash, ambiguous links, poor/missing alternative text, complex forms, and poor keyboard accessibility are cited as the most problematic items on the web
• Headings are the primary mechanism (50.8% of respondents) for finding information within a page.