Progressive Enhancement -- Accessibility

November 25, 2003 | 12 Comments

In my continuing efforts to make this site better and more usable I’ve spent some time recently on accessibility.

I’ve validated the site against Section 508 guidelines and I’m in the process of addressing the W3C’s Web content accessiblity guidelines. So far I’ve taken care of all the priority 1 checkpoints, on most pages, and I’m working on the rest as I can.

I’ve added labels to the elements of the various forms and added access keys to many of the pages as well. This is, and will continue to be, a work in progress. As this isn’t a typical Web site — in that it doesn’t have a real global navigation scheme or structured information architecture and many of the pages, while sharing the same look and feel, don’t function in the same way — it’s been and interesting exercise thus far.

For more details, view my new accessibility statement and if you have any comments, questions or suggestions, feel free to post them.

Filed under: Web Development

Comments

1. MJH said:

Got a question (or 5)… Its something I ran across on my site, and I read some ALA article on it too, but…

Exactly where is a good place to put that accessibility statement link? Once it disappears from the homepage, how do users know what access keys do what? How accessible is the accessible page, if you will? Should there be a standard accessibility key which takes you to the site’s accessibility statement? I see it in your Quick Nav, but thats only after I was searching to see where you put it. What does one do about this problem? Not to mention the fact that each browser handles access keys (if they support them at all) differently…

sorry for rambling.

Posted on November 26, 2003 06:55 AM | #

2. Scrivs said:

I would think the about page would be a good place to place the info, along with a “accessibility info” link at the bottom of the page.

Posted on November 26, 2003 07:26 AM | #

3. MJH said:

A good suggestion, but people wouldnt know enough to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, rendering the idea of having one about equal to useless…

Posted on November 26, 2003 08:11 AM | #

4. Nick Finck said:

If the user can be accountable to scroll to the bottom of the page to understand the copyrights associated with the material on a given page, then they sould be held by the same standards for accessibility.

The only exception to this is the priority of this information to a user who is accessing the site via accessible means (i.e. screen readers, etc.) in which case a link can be provided to the screenreader only for this purpose where a graphical web browser will not see the link. This is why ‘media’ is an attribute for the link element. Screen is one value of this attribute. So is aural, braille, tty, and others.

Of course, it is widly known that not all screen readers, braille machines, and TTY devices support this attribute properly. So much testing with actual accessibility devices (not simulated environments) would be required.

Posted on November 26, 2003 08:22 AM | #

5. Scrivs said:

If someone is really in the need for the accessibility features of the site I am sure they would be more than willing to go down to the bottom of the page to access them. Besides that I am sure there is a “non-written” standard as to what key access what on a website. One of them could access the accessibility guidelines for the site.

Posted on November 26, 2003 08:51 AM | #

6. Keith said:

I’m not sure what the best answer is and I did put some thought into that. What I did was put it at the bottom of the right sidebar on the homepage and added it to my “quickmenu” on those pages – like individual entries – where folks might either go looking for that stuff or enter via google, etc.

I also used the general convention of making it’s access key = “0”. I think this will help most folks who need it find it.

Again, this site offers particular challenges in this area. I think on most sites the link would fit best in the footer and then again on any “about” or “disclaimer” type pages.

As of right now I’ve got no user testing to back that up, just my best guesses.

It’s a good question to think about. If someone figures it out or has some data to back up a particular location I’d love to know about it.

Posted on November 26, 2003 09:39 AM | #

7. Mike said:

I usually put the Accessibility statement (and validation) right next to my other validation statements like XHTML, CSS, etc.

Posted on November 28, 2003 01:05 PM | #

8. patrick h. lauke said:

keith, a few suggestion to add to your site:

on the homepage, all the “1 comments”, “28 comments” etc links should get a unique title (otherwise you risk having the same link text going to different pages, which in terms of accessibility will flag some alarm bells in validators). ideally, you could have a title=”view the 28 comments on [INSERT TITLE OF YOUR NEWS ITEM]” (with possibly a special case when the number is zero).

similar thing with the “Filed under Web Development” links. add titles such as “[INSERT TITLE OF YOUR NEWS ITEM] was filed under Web Development - view all articles filed under this category”.

is it possible to merge the two links at the top (the asterisk* and the tagline) into a single link as well somehow ?

oh…and the search accesskey doesn’t seem to work on the accessibility statement page.

Posted on November 28, 2003 03:17 PM | #

9. Ro said:

As you are aware, pressing ‘tab’ in most browsers allows you to toggle focus throughout the array of links on a page in incremental fashion.

The behavior is to ‘loop’ back around to the first link after the last link has been blurred.

It’s interesting to note that on your pages, the cycle seems to ‘hang’ mid-way through the cycle; the links in the right-hand column are skipped.

Playing around with it for a bit, it seems that your Flash object tag may be the culprit.

Posted on November 29, 2003 12:31 PM | #

10. Keith said:

Patrick and Ro, good comments and suggestions. I’ll do my best to look into those as I have time. For the most part I’m pleased with how accessible the site was even before I did anything, but I guess with these things there is usually room for improvement.

But I wonder if at times accessibility can go too far or just get to a point where the benefit doesn’t justify the amount of effort.

Like with the tab order vs. Flash object issue that Ro brings up, I imagine there are times when usability and/or accessibility can meet up and conflict with the goals of a site.

I think that every effort should be taken to make a site as accessible as possible (and I’m pretty sure I can resolve this issue) but I do imagine at times there could be a particular site goal that trumps a lower priority accessibility feature or it might be determined it’s just not worth the effort to take care of a lower level accessibility point on some sites.

Posted on November 29, 2003 01:22 PM | #

11. Lynn said:

Hi Keith,

> But I wonder if at times accessibility can go

> too far or just get to a point where the

> benefit doesn’t justify the amount of effort.

Approx. 1 in 4 visitors to your site will be disabled or close to a disabled person. I’m glad you’re not missing out on that huge market share by putting accessibility on the back burner! No amount of effort is too much, and it’s always appreciated when a blind person or someone with motor skills impairment or other disability visits your site.

Posted on March 4, 2004 05:20 AM | #