“The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.” Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web
Our Society has benefited in many ways from the information technology revolution. However, not everyone can reap the benefits of this technology change. In context of the Internet a website should be developed to serve the largest possible audience using different hardware and software platforms, connectivity and devices. Also the needs of users with disabilities should be considered while developing the website. What is important is that users should be able to view a web page the way they wish to view it with the equipment that they have available.
The term ‘universal accessibility’ or ‘barrier free access’ refers to making a website accessible to ALL irrespective of technology, platforms, devices or disabilities of any kind. However, the scope of this article is primarily to focus on making websites accessible to people who are differently abled and suffer some limitation on account of physical challenges.
It is now being felt world over that it is the responsibility of every web site developer to design ‘Barrier-Free’ Websites to ensure that people with disabilities have equal access to public information that is available on the Internet and the World Wide Web. It is the direct responsibility of the agency and its web page developers to become familiar with the guidelines for achieving universal accessibility and to apply these principles in designing and creating any Website.
Many accessibility solutions described in this article contribute to “universal design” (also called “design for all”) by benefiting non-disabled users as well as people with disabilities. For example, support for speech output not only benefits blind users, but also Web users whose eyes are busy with other tasks; while captions for audio not only benefit deaf users, but also increase the efficiency of indexing and searching for audio content on Web sites.
€|What is Barrier Free Web Access? The term “Barrier Free Access” refers to the initiative to make sure information, especially that being made available on the web, is accessible by all citizens, including those with disabilities requiring special software to “read” the information.
€|Barriers of different kinds It is worthwhile remembering that impairments take a variety of forms and can exist together in combination. These vary from person to person and can be either sensory or motor disabilities.
However, the term “physically challenged” or “disabled” is used very generally in this article. Some people with conditions described below would not consider themselves to have disabilities. They may, however, have limitations of sensory, physical or cognitive functioning, which can affect access to the Web. The lists of barriers below are illustrative and not intended to be comprehensive.
Visual disabilities Some common visual disabilities are blindness, low visions and colour blindness. Such people depend on screen software that reads a web page one line at a time, horizontally across the screen. In case of images, the screen readers read the ‘alternate text’ portion. Examples of barriers that individuals with these forms of disabilities may encounter on the Web include: . Images that do not have alt text and so can not be read by screen readers and complex images (e.g., graphs or charts) that are not adequately described by using. . Video that is not described in text or audio. . Tables that do not make sense when read serially (in a cell-by-cell or “linearized” mode). . Forms that cannot be tabbed through in a logical sequence or that are poorly labeled. . Browsers that lack keyboard support for all commands. . Non-standard document formats that may be difficult for their screen reader to interpret. . Inadequate contrast between foreground and background.
Hearing Impairment People with hearing problems also have to overcome various obstacles while accessing the Web. Some common barriers related to hearing disabilities viz. deafness and heard of hearing are as follows.
Deafness Due to substantial uncorrectable impairment of hearing in both ears, one may or may not read or speak a language fluently. As a result he/she faces some common barriers due to the reasons listed below. . lack of captions or transcripts of audio on the Web. . requirements for voice input on Web sites.
Hard of hearing One major barrier faced by this group is difficulty in comprehending audio and video content. To use the Web, these people may rely on captions for audio content and/or amplification of audio. They may need to toggle the captions on an audio file on or off, or adjust the volume of an audio file.
Motor disability This type of disability includes weakness, limitations of muscular control and sensation, joint problems and missing limbs among others. Barriers that people with motor disabilities affecting the hands or arms may encounter include: . time-limited response options on Web pages. . websites that do not support keyboard alternatives for mouse commands. . forms that cannot be tabbed through in a logical order.
Speech disability This kind of disability includes difficulty in producing speech either in terms of clarity or loudness. One major disability encountered by these people on the web is with the websites that require voice-based interaction without any alternative input mode.
Cognitive and neurological disabilities Dyslexia, dyscalculia Often termed as “learning disabilities”, an individual with this disability faces various problems related to processing adequate information from written data, reading or visualization data from the web. Lack of alternative modalities for catering audio and visual related data can be subjected as a barrier for such disabilities.
Attention deficit disorder Individuals with attention deficit suffer from difficulty in focusing on information with continuity. Some challenges that may be faced by these people are distracting visual or audio elements that cannot easily be turned off and lack of clear and consistent organization of websites.
Impairments of intelligence Often individuals suffer from slow learning while understanding complex concepts. Barriers related to accessibility of websites for such persons can be categorized as follows: . use of unnecessarily complex language on Web sites. . lack of graphics on Web sites. . lack of clear or consistent organization of Web sites.
Memory impairments Individuals with mental or emotional disabilities may have difficulty focusing on information on a Web site, or difficulty with blurred vision or hand tremors due to side effects from medications. Barriers that are attached to this disability includes: . Distracting visual or audio elements that cannot easily be turned off. . Web pages with absolute font sizes that do not enlarge easily.
Seizure disorders Visual flickering or audio signals at a certain frequency trigger some individuals with seizure disorders. Hence visual frequencies that can trigger seizures should not be used.
Aging-Related Conditions Changes in people’s functional ability due to aging can include subtle and/or gradual changes in abilities or a combination of abilities including vision, hearing, dexterity and memory. Barriers can include any of the issues already mentioned above.
€|Laws and regulations The good news is that, many rules and regulations are now in place all over the world to support the need for ensuring universal accessibility for the physically challenged. WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) is the name given to the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) commitment to lead the Web to its full potential includes promoting a high degree of usability for people with disabilities. WAI, in coordination with organizations around the world, pursues accessibility of the Web through five primary areas of work: technology, guidelines, tools, education and outreach, and research and development.
As with all W3C recommendations, compliance is voluntary. The recommendations comprise a set of “Checkpoints” or design practices. These Checkpoints are ranked into three categories, defined by the WAI as Priorities 1, 2 or 3, according to its view of their relative decreasing importance in enabling Web access by people with impairments. Conformance with all the Checkpoints in a particular priority category (and those below it) qualifies a site for the designation “Conformance Level A, AA, or AAA” respectively.
The Indian Government is also keen to ensure that the Indian websites are accessible for the physically challenged users. The Civil Commissioner of Disabilities (CCD) is working out mechanisms, in consultation with NIC whereby guidelines shall be formulated for adhering to web design practices in compliance with accessibility regulations prevalent world over.
€|Assistive Technologies A lot of new technologies are now being used which are opening doors for the physically challenged people to a previously inaccessible world. Assistive technologies mainly refer to the products used by such people to help accomplish tasks that they cannot accomplish otherwise or could not do easily otherwise. When used with computers, assistive technologies are also refered to as adaptive software. Some assistive technologies rely on output of other user agents, such as graphical desktop browsers, text browsers, voice browsers, multimedia players, and plug-ins. Some popular assistive technologies include: . Alternative keyboards or switches: the purpose of alternative keyboards or switches is providing alternative way of creating keystrokes apart from a standard keyboard. This may include various software and hardware especially designed for physically challenged people. Examples are on-screen keyboard, eyegaze keyboards, key guards that allow pressing one key at a time. . Braille and refreshable Braille: Especially designed for blind people, these technology consists of six to eight raised dots in various patterns representing letters and numbers that can be easily read by fingertips. . Screen magnifiers: This technology makes various presentations larger and reduces the area of the document that is to be viewed. This system is primarily for individuals with low vision. . Sound notification: Sound notification is an alternative feature of some Web-based applications that allows deaf or hard of hearing users to receive visual notification that a warning or error sound has been emitted by the computer. . Screen readers: Software used by individuals who are either blind or who have dyslexia that interprets what is displayed on a screen and directs it either to speech synthesis for audio output, or to refreshable Braille for tactile output. . Speech recognition: Speech or voice recognition device is used as an input process by those physically disables suffering from injuries to hands and forearms. . Scanning software: Scanning software is adaptive software used by individuals with some physical or cognitive disabilities that highlights or announces selection choices (e.g., menu items, links, phrases) one at a time. A user selects a desired item by hitting a switch when the desired item is highlighted or announced. . Tabbing through structural elements: It includes assistive technologies such as software or hardware. This technology is for those individuals who cannot use a mouse, scan through links, list items or surf other structural items on a web due to blindness or dyslexic disability. . Text browsers: Text browsers such as Lynx are an alternative to graphical user interface browsers. They can be used with screen readers for people who are blind. . Voice browsers: Voice browsers are systems, which allow voice-driven navigation, some with both voice-input and voice-output, and some allowing telephone-based Web access.
How to know if your website is accessible (Testing tools) Bobby testing W3C Web Accessibility Initiative is not a standard but a set of guidelines. A page can be compared against the guidelines to raise a Web manager’s awareness of accessibility issues. The leading tool for this is Bobby software. The bobby service will scan the page and then generate an automated report highlighting areas of concern and suggesting what could be done to rectify them. Bobby analysing application - http://webxact.watchfire.com/
The WAVE accessibility test The Wave accessibility checker, is an online service that will check the webpage and mark it visually with icons that help you understand how assistive technology will read or display the page. Other useful features are: . shows the order in which elements will appear on the page to, eg, a screen reader. . denotes “alt” text of images and applets. . marks links that contain JavaScript events, headings, and HTML keyboard shortcuts. Wave accessibility checker - http://wave.webaim.org/index.jsp
Page Valet The Page Valet is an online validator with a range of accessibility testing features based on the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Useful features are: . supports a range of markup languages, . it shows the source code with any errors annotated and highlighted (provided your browser supports CSS). Page valet validator - http://valet.webthing.com/page/
Web Accessibility checker from ATRC This is a service provided by Adaptive Technology Resource Center (ATRC) at the University Of Toronto. Web accessibility checker has been designed to check for the three WCAG conformance levels - A (Priority 1 items), AA (Priority 1 and 2 items) and AAA (Priority 1, 2 and 3 items). When accessibility issues are detected the toolkit displays relevant dialog boxes and guides to enable the user to fix a range of problems. A-Prompt Toolkit - http://checker.atrc.utoronto.ca/index.html
€|Making websites accessible It has become very important for designers and developers to make websites that provide the most aesthetically pleasing content available for any group of users, irrespective of their physical challenges or the kind of platforms and devices they are using.
No authoring tool can automatically create accessible sites. Designing accessible websites requires one to understand accessibility requirements and make decisions about how users with disabilities will interact with their web pages.
However For web designers who need to create accessible content, authoring tools like Dreamweaver and Front page assist in creating pages that contain useful content for screen readers and comply with accessibility guidelines. For example Dreamweaver provides dialog boxes that prompt the user to enter accessibility attributes when they insert elements like images forms media etc in a webpage. In dreamweaver the accessibility dialog box for images reminds the user to add text equivalents for graphics so that when the image appears on a page for a user with visual disabilities the screen reader reads the description.
The accessibility option is available through edit > preferences > accessibility menu from the dreamweaver interface. Here the user can choose the elements that he wants to be prompted for when they are inserted into a page. Dreamweaver also provides template web pages that were designed for accessibility.
€|Portable Document Format (PDF) and accessibility The Portable Document Format (PDF) is widely used in electronic publishing. It is the universal file format that preserves the look and feel of a document, including the fonts, formatting, colours and graphics, regardless of the application and platform used to originate it.
Information on Accessibility features present in adobe PDF is available at Adobe online accessibility resource - http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/solutionsacc.html
€|To ensure that an organization’s website is universally accessible, the following WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Group) 1.0 Guidelines can be initially implemented . Provide equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content - Provide content that, when presented to your user, conveys essentially the same function or purpose as auditory or visual content, e.g., text summaries or transcripts. . Do not rely on colour alone - Ensure that your text and graphics are understandable when viewed without colour. . Use mark up and style sheets and do so properly - Mark up documents with the proper structural elements; control your presentation with style sheets rather than with HTML presentation elements and attributes. . Clarify natural language usage - Mark up documents with the proper structural elements; control your presentation with style sheets rather than with HTML presentation elements and attributes. . Create tables that transform gracefully - Ensure that your tables have necessary mark up to be transformed by accessible browsers and other software. . Ensure that pages featuring new technologies transform gracefully - Ensure that pages are accessible even when newer technologies are not supported or are turned off, e.g., when style sheets are not supported, when appropriate provide the <noframes> and <no script> options. . Ensure user control of time-sensitive content changes - Ensure that moving, blinking, scrolling, or auto-updating objects or pages may be paused or stopped. . Ensure direct accessibility of embedded user interfaces - Ensure that the user interface follows the principles of accessible design: device-independent access to functionality, keyboard operability, e.g., do not rely on scripts, applets and plug-ins for essential functions. . Design for device-independence - Use features that enable the activation of your page elements via a variety of input devices, e.g., if an image map is used provide a text alternative. . Use interim solutions - Use interim accessibility solutions so that assistive technologies and older browsers will operate correctly. . Use W3C technologies and guidelines - Use W3C technologies (according to specification) and follow accessibility guidelines. Where this is not possible or doing so results in material that does not transform gracefully, provide an alternative version of the content that is accessible. . Provide context and orientation information - Provide context and orientation information to help your users understand complex pages or elements, e.g., complex relationships between parts of a page can be difficult for users with cognitive disabilities and for those with visual impairment. . Provide clear navigation mechanisms - Provide clear and consistent navigation mechanisms - orientation information, navigation bars, a site map, etc in order to increase the likelihood that a user will find what they are looking for on your site. . Ensure that documents are clear and simple - Ensure that documents are clear and simple so they may be more easily understood, e.g., consistent shape and feel, use of plain language, recognizable graphics.
€|Other Considerations In addition to the w3c guidelines there are a few more tips which if kept in mind not only benefit the less abled but also make the site more usable for the average user. . Contrast between the background and the text on a webpage is very important. It should be ensured that there is adequate contrast between these. If using a coloured background it is better have one that is single and solid, rather than textured or patterned. There are a range of colour combinations that do cause difficulty, for example: - Red and green - Red and purple - Yellow and white/light grey - Pink/lavender pastel colours It is better to avoid such combinations. . Pop up windows are disorienting for users who cannot see that a new window has been created, eg, users with a screen reader or screen magnifier, or where the pop-up window covers the original one. . Use of invisible images to aid page layout should be avoided. CSS attributes and values should be used instead. If an image is simply for decorative purposes and is not essential to the understanding of the website, an empty alt=” “ also known as a ‘null alt’ should be used. . Blinking or scrolling text creates problems for people with visual disabilities and is distracting for the normal user. It also creates a difficulty for text-reading software. It should therefore be avoided. Some moving type is browser specific, eg the marquee element; some moving type uses scripting or active content that may also be browser-limited. . Text links to documents should be descriptive and convey meaning Rather than using just ‘Click here’ It is more meaningful to link on the words ‘Go to the next page’. . Title attribute can be added to the HTML href element within an HTML page as a screen reader reads out the text contained in this attribute. . Ensure that a website using frames is usable with non-frames-capable browsers by using the <noframes> option. Give each frame a meaningful title.
Hence, Website developers, in government or outside must obtain a better understanding of the accessibility needs, and recognize that such improved understanding is in their interest in the long run. They also have a moral duty to anticipate these needs and should address the issue urgently, rather than waiting for the next redevelopment cycle.