Making Information Technology Accessible for People with Disabilities

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Making Information Technology Accessible for People with Disabilities
By Gregg Vanderheiden, Director, and
Wendy Chisholm, Human Factors Engineer
Trace Research and Development Center
University of Wisconsin - Madison

In recent years, growing emphasis has been placed on access to the World Wide Web for people with disabilities, as well as to many other computer and telecommunications technologies. Those technologies increasingly require that users deal with them by means of multimedia user interfaces -- icons, graphics, pictures, sound, motion, video and other attributes that go far beyond plain text.

This emphasis on accessibility comes about as a result of factors including the burgeoning community of people with disabilities who use these technologies, and laws passed to ensure equal access to information technologies. These laws include the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the Telecommunications Act of 1996, among many others. Enforcement of these and other laws has only just begun.

Basics:
General Idea How can you make Web sites, for example, accessible to people with disabilities? Here are general principles:

"Modality independent medium": Ensure that the information on a site can be read independent of the way it’s presented -- without the need for special software or devices to use it. For visitors who use special software or devices, help avoid confusing the content itself with how that content is presented. For example, keep the hidden codes that control character size, bolding, colors, icons, graphics, pictures, sound, motion, video, etc. from being interpreted as plain text).

"Meta information": Use applicable standards in presenting content, separating structure and content from presentation, so that users can easily figure out how to navigate the site.

Following these basic principles makes systems more usable for everyone, including able-bodied users, regardless what method they use to deal with the systems, including:

Audio, for people who are blind or visually impaired, or for individuals in vehicles.

Text documents immediately available to a person who is blind, who in the past would have had to order, and wait weeks for, Braille or audio recordings.

Captioning for audio or video, which can be in different languages, for people who are deaf, learning a language or in noisy locations.

All documents, including audio and video, accessible to text-based search engines and software.

Some Practical Details
The following is distilled from the W3C WAI Page Authoring Guidelines, which we co-edit. (The current draft may be found at www.w3.org/wai/gl/). W3C stands for World Wide Web Consortium, WAI for Web Accessibility Initiative.

1.Allow the user to customize the presentation of documents to meet special needs (e.g. only use large fonts, use certain color combinations, etc.)

2.Allow users to override author-specified styles and browser default styles.

3.Provide access to alternative representations of all information ("alt" text of images, transcripts of video, etc.) so that a page may be used with or without vision as well as with or without hearing.

4.Provide tools to navigate the document: from link to link, frame to frame, etc. Allow navigation through keyboard at all times.

5.Provide tools to improve orientation within the document so that the user can quickly grasp content and context.

6.Render a page so that other software -- generally called "third-party assistive technology" -- may interpret the page in a manner useful to the user. A screen reader is one example of such technology; it synthesizes rendered lines of text in succession as speech.

How Accessible Is Your Web site?
Put your site to the test by visiting www.cast.org/bobby -- a free service of The Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST). "Bobby" will rapidly evaluate your web site and diagnose any accessibility problems. Free information and software needed to make changes to your site can also be found there. If your site qualifies, it can display CAST’s newly developed "Bobby" seal of approval.

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