Your Site's Easy to Navigate? You Think So?

Michael Kear, of AFP Webworks, kicked it off:

I have just come out of a most enlightening session with a blind user, running though a client's web site with JAWS, a screen reading program that turns the web page into synthesized voice.

I thought I was quite aware of accessibility issues before, and was comfortable in thinking that my sites were better than the average in providing access to the blind and people with other disabilities. This session was educational to say the least.

I am still convinced my sites are better than average, but I am bound to inform you that the average is pretty damn poor. I know some people are really concerned about accessibility for the disabled, and others have decided that the disabled are such a small portion of their user base, it's not worth changing everything to allow for them.

I'm here to tell you that it's not difficult to design a good site to allow for access, it just takes a little understanding of how programs like JAWS works. To be truthful, I think that if I were blind, I'd go stark raving mad at all the frustrations of life but trying to surf the web wouldn't make life any easier that's for sure.

For example, he took us through a page of our bookshop. And we'd arranged things to look nice on the page, but there were parts of the catalogue page where he didn't know what the "add to basket" graphic was referring to - this book or the previous one. And some nested tables were simply awful and impossible to work round.

We all think putting navigation buttons on the top of every page makes for easy navigation, but blind people have to wade through (in our case) 50 navigation links before getting to the guts of the page. On a search of our site, the resulting page has a nice header at the top with links to all our site's categories and sub-categories and then a sidebar with links to other parts of the site, and finally the search results itself. Visually it looks fine - quick and simple to move around the site. But using the screen reading software it took **AGES** to get to anything related to the search. By just laying out the page differently, we could have made this page FAR easier to navigate for him.

I'm not suggesting we should all go about redesigning our sites just for the relatively few blind users, but just understanding how the software works, has made me re-think many of the forms I build. The user also said that Government sites tended to be the worst of all. I'm not sure if that's because they're designed by developers with an eye on the government money or because they are specified by bureaucrats. Certainly of all the sites that ought to know about accessibility, Government sites ought to be the leaders, and apparently they aren't.

I think as web developers, you'd all be doing A Good Thing if you arranged for a meeting like we just had at Australian Consumers Association - have a blind person come and work your site for you using their screen reading software. At the risk of being accused of making an off-colour joke, it's a real eye-opener.

James Maltby responds:

You should take a look at Bobby and the WAI guide. Bobby is a collaboration project between (amongst others) SUN microsystems and Microsoft (gasp!) (http://www.cast.org/bobby/) - you can either download the Java based tool or use the website to check a website you have built for accessibility, while the WWW Consortioum have been working on the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) since the mid nineties (http://www.w3.org/WAI/), which gives web designers guidelines as how to build sites.

The key to designing sites for accessibility is to always offer an alternative - in that if you have a Flash site, then do it in plain html; if you have a graph, then write a description of the data on a separate page and add the link to it next to the image, etc. Always use alt tags and never use frames.

From the outset it can take a while to get into the working practice of designing for accessibility, but once you take into consideration the guide (above) and test your sites, then there should not be a problem.

As a guide, also get hold of Lynx, the text only browser, and check your site(s) on this, too (for as a rule of thumb, that is how voice browsers will "read" your site). If you can't navigate your site with Lynx, then a blind user will never be able to use your site.

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