July 7, 2012

Questions: Designing for Accessibility on the Web

Marco Zehe recently wrote a good, sobering blog post comparing the accessibility of Web apps to those of native ones.

Much of what I’ve seen on supporting accessibility on the Web has to do with using the right standards: always providing alt attributes for images, for example, or adding semantic ARIA metadata to one’s markup.

As a designer, however, I don’t have much interest in these standards because they don’t seem to address human factors. What’s more interesting to me is understanding how screen readers present the user interface to vision-impaired people and how usable that interface is to them. This would parallel my own experience of designing for non-impaired users, where I use my understanding of human-computer interaction to create interfaces from first principles.

I’ve been meaning to actually get a screen reader and try browsing the Web for a few days to get a better idea of how to build usable interfaces, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet, and I’m also not sure if it’s the best way to empathize with vision-impaired users. In any case, though, my general concern is that there seems to be a distinct lack of material on “how to build truly usable web applications for the vision impaired.” Instead, I only see articles on how to be ARIA standards-compliant, which tells me nothing about the actual human factors involved in designing for accessibility.

So, I’ll be spending some time looking for such resources, and trying to get a better idea of what it’s like to use the internet as someone who is vision-impaired. If you know of any good pointers, please feel free to tweet at me. Thanks!

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