Web Accessibility Prep

Overview

When thinking about who is going to use your website, it’s important to consider users that have different abilities than you or your average user. Making sure that your website is usable by everyone, including those with disabilities or different abilities, is termed web accessibility. There are easy and difficult things you can do to improve the accessibility of your site, so it’s important to at least do the easy ones and think about how you can also do the difficult things.

Basic Learning Objectives

Before class, you should be able to:

• List two examples of web page elements/design that make it difficult for people with visual impairments to navigate
• List two examples of web page elements/design that make it difficult for people with motor impairments to navigate
• List two examples of web page elements/design that make it difficult for people with cognitive impairments to navigate
• Define the POUR acronym
• Explain the importance of structure in web accessibility

Advanced Learning Objectives

After class, you should be able to:

• Explain the importance of making web sites accessible, including the human rights case and business case
• Identify examples of the four POUR principles
• Use best practices in accessible design

Readings

To achieve the basic learning objectives, you should read the following:

• Chapter 12: Accessibility and you, in Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think! Revisited

• “Introduction to web accessibility”, by AIM.

• Select and read at least two stories from “Stories of web users: How people with disabilities use the web”, by the Web Accessibility Initiative. Feel free to click around to whatever examples look compelling to you.

Checks

Use the WAVE Web Accessibility Tool to test the accessibility of a safe-for-work and database-driven web page of your choice. Post the website name and one of your observations/findings on CampusWire under the Week6Wednesday category.