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Designing for Students with Disabilities

Why Accessible Design?
http://www.htmlhelp.com/design/accessibility/why.html

Accessibility in Distance Education
http://www.umuc.edu/distance/odell/cade/ade/index.html

A Challenge
Turn off your browser images (in the Edit-->Preferences-->Advanced menu in Navigator, or Internet Options-->Advanced-->Multimedia in Explorer) and then go through one of your favorite websites. This will give you an idea of how students with disabilities access web pages, and how much information is lost to them.

  • Are you able to navigate?
  • Do the images have ALT tags so that you get a description of the missing images?
  • Is the web page as entertaining or as useful as it usually is?
  • Are there tables in the page? Tables are very difficult for reader programs.
  • Is there a text only version of the page?

Guidelines
Ensuring barrier-free access to web pages can be summarized by the following guidelines:

Guideline 1: Provide equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content.
Guideline 2: Don't rely on color alone.
Guideline 3: Create tables that transform gracefully.
Guideline 4: Ensure that pages featuring new technology transform gracefully.
Guideline 5: Ensure user control of time sensitive content.
Guideline 6: Ensure direct accessibility of event user interfaces.
Guideline 7: Design for device independence.
Guideline 8: Use interim solutions.
Guideline 9: Provide content and orientation information.
Guideline 10: Provide clear navigation mechanisms.
Guideline 11: Ensure that documents are clear and simple.

Suggestions
Images and animations:

  • Provide text alternatives for such items especially when the image or animation conveys actual content information and is more than decorative.
  • Where graphics are necessary, be sure to include ALT tags.
  • Avoid server-side image maps and where necessary use client-side maps as they let the client software have more control. Use text for hot spots.
  • Consider your color choices carefully. See Effective Color Contrast by Aries Arditi, Lighthouse International.
  • Some low-vision students may benefit from adjusting their browser settings to increase legibility.

Multimedia

  • Provide captioning of videos or at least text transcriptions.
  • If needed, provide text descriptions for the blind which will depend on whether or not all information is conveyed through the audio already.

Hypertext links

  • Remember that blind users will have the actual highlighted links read to them, and it is important that those words make sense read out of context.

Page organization

  • Design your page layout for clarity and simplicity.
  • Make your page organization consistent from page to page.
  • Use headers and lists in a logical manner.
  • Where possible use cascading style sheets for layout and style.

Graphs and charts

  • If these are complex, you may need to provide a text explanation in a link or use the longdesc attribute

Scripts, applets and plug-ins

  • It is possible that active features may be unsupported by a user's software or the features may be inherently inaccessible. Therefore, provide alternative content.

Frames

  • It is important that you label frames with the title or name attribute. (This is important to help disabled users understand the page layout and relationship between frames.)

Tables

  • Frequently a summarization of the table is useful to help explain its meaning but especially for disabled users who may not grasp it all in context.
  • Also make line by line reading of tables so that it makes sense.
  • Avoid using tables for column layout.

Checking your work

  • Be sure to validate your HTML.
  • Check the pages with different browsers with graphics on and with graphics turned off.
  • Use some accessibility checker and, where possible, have users with disabilities also look at your pages.

Resources