This document provides an overview of accessibility with a focus on visual impairments. It discusses different types of impairments including blindness, color blindness, mobility issues, and learning difficulties. Specific guidance is given around color blindness, including statistics on prevalence and examples of how websites appear to those who are color blind. Screen readers like JAWS are explained, including how they are used to navigate web pages. Common accessibility errors are also outlined. The challenges of addressing accessibility as an agency are acknowledged.

1. Accessibility 101
With particular reference to
visual impairment
Barry Briggs
User Experience Architect
Code Computerlove
04/03/2012

2. Accessibility != Blind
1. Visual impairment
• Blind, colour-blind
2. Audio impairment
• Deaf, hard of hearing
3. Mobility impairment
• Restricted or impaired movement of hands, head etc
4. Learning difficulties
5. Other mental health considerations
• See the Mental Capacity Act 2005 for a better explanation

3. That said…
This presentation will focus on visual impairment

4. Visual Impairment
The most common and the easiest to address

5. Colour–blindness

6. Colour blind
• It’s a Male gene thing – Women have gotten off lightly
• Different types of colour blindness, some more
common than others
• Effects 8% of the male population
• Roughly 1 in 25 people looking at our websites

7. Google analytics
Typical view
From wearecolorblind.com

8. Google analytics
Orange and
green look same
What you typically see if you’re colour-blind
From wearecolorblind.com

9. Let’s look at that statistic again
• 1 in 25 people looking at our websites are colour-blind
• Which means that last month, approximately:
• 13,000 colour-blind people looked at Trans-Pennine Express
• 11,000 colour-blind people looked at Travis Perkins
• 5200 colour-blind people looked at Late Deals
• This is not a minor issue

10. TPE
Colour-blind view

11. Travis Perkins
Colour-blind view

12. Late Deals
Colour-blind view

13. Some key take-outs
• Greens, reds, oranges and blues are virtually
indistinguishable
• It’s not safe to rely on colour and contrast levels to
distinguish content
• Whenever possible use shape as well as colour as a
differentiator

14. iChat software
From wearecolorblind.com

15. iChat software
What you typically see if
you’re colour-blind
From wearecolorblind.com

16. iChat software
What you typically see if Use shapes to
you’re colour-blind help differentiate
From wearecolorblind.com

17. Further reading on colour-blindness
• http://wearecolorblind.com/
• http://www.etre.com/tools/colourblindsimulator/
• http://www.vischeck.com/
• http://www.colourblindawareness.org/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness
• http://colorvisiontesting.com/

18. Blindness

19. Blindness
• 1 in 5 people likely to have some form of visual accessibility
issue
• Blind people look to buy stuff on internet just like everyone
else
• Not always practical to go high street shopping
• They need and want to spend money like everyone else
• eCommerce in own home allows them to use their own assistive
devices and shop at their own speed
• Estimated potential spend of £80m a year
• This is a big potential audience
• It’s also a big missed opportunity for eTailers failing to provide
accessible browsing & purchasing options

20. Ignore at your peril
• Equalities act 2010 bans “unfair treatment of people because of
protected characteristics they have”
• Age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership,
pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, sexual
orientation
• Disney class action lawsuit in USA
• Settled out of court so they didn’t have to fix the issues
• RNIB now suing them in the UK
• RNIB also suing BMI Baby
• Target sued in USA for about $10m

21. From jaws5.net

22. Screen readers
• Screen reader software “reads” aloud what’s on the screen
• JAWS is the most common screen reader
• 75% market share
• Works on desktop applications and websites
• Has several “helper” features integrated into IE to make browsing
easier
• However…

23. JAWS
• JAWS is expensive
• It’s a big investment/initial purchase
• The price puts people off updating What the hell???
• Lots of people still using older versions
From freedomscientific.com

24. JAWS
• Version 7
• was the first to work with Windows XP
• was the first version to receive mass adoption
• still has very large user base
• Version 13 is the latest
• works with Vista and Windows 7
• can just about cope with very basic inline updates
• limited user base at present time

25. How do people use JAWS?
• Pages are scanned, not read
1. Page loads and screen reader reads out the <TITLE> tag
• Hence meaningful titles are critical
2. While they’re navigating people will use a Link List
• A popup window that lists all inks on a page
3. Once they think they are on right page people will use a List of Headings
• A popup that lists all the <H?> tags on a page, along with their heading level
• Think of it like a simplified “document outline”
4. Once an appropriate heading has been found, screen reader will read out
the content under that heading
• Advanced users speed up the voice to make page scanning faster

26. JAWS Link list
<a href=“#”>Link Text</a>
From jimthatcher.com

27. JAWS Heading list
Heading/Subheading Heading level eg: <H2>
From standards-schmandards.com

28. Common accessibility errors
• Text alternatives – A
• Use alt tags for significant/relevent images
• Not for spacer images!
• Intelligent use of, not over used otherwise it's gibberish
• Form labels and input fields – A
• Form layouts require fieldsets and legends to make sense
• eg: radio buttons – lots of yes/no options & no connected question
• HTML Lang(uage) of page – A
• specify its English so screen readers get right pronunciations
• JAWS has automatic language detection – JAWS has an accent!
• Link/anchor text – A
• “click here” & “find out more” are evil – remember the link list?
• Anchor text should contain descriptive copy
• Eg: “More about our accommodation”
• Link “title” attributes clash with link text – link text is preferred

29. JAWS Link list
What the hell???
From standards-schmandards.com

30. More common accessibility errors
• Page titles – A
• First thing screen reader says and invaluable for orientation
• Should state page name, section name, and site name
• Tables for layouts rather than tabular data – A
• If it’s not tabular data, tables are bad, mmmmm, okay?
• Reader says "table with x columns and x rows”
• If you MUST display other content in a table add summaries to
explain what the table is about – sets expectations re: jumbled
content, or allows the user to skip past it completely
• Headings – AAA
• H1 and H2 quite common but not always used correctly
• Non-visually impaired users derive structure from colour and font
size but visually impaired users need semantic mark-up
• Vital to give sense of structure to page

31. Some key take-outs
• If screen reader can’t see it, blind users can’t either
• Semantic mark-up, effective copywriting and well structured
documents are vital
• Helps orientation, page scanning and content location
• Front-load paragraphs so can tell meaning from first few words
• Forms should use field sets and label tags to group questions and
answers together semantically
• DOM updates not detected by most popular screen readers
• Screen Reader tech lags far behind standard browser tech
• AAA links to change font size are pointless
• Visually impaired users know how to change the font size!!
• Box ticking exercise
• Actually a hindrance – first thing screen readers says is “ay-ay-ay” –
makes website sounds like a deranged Scouser

32. And some other interesting points
• “Skip to content” vs “Skip to navigation”
• Why should every page have a skip to content link?
• Why not make the content first and have a skip to navigation?
• Screen readers can bypass all this anyway and bring up a Link Lists
• Automatically playing videos drown out screen reader
• If videos are Flash screen reader cannot stop or mute the video
• If videos are HTML5 screen reader probably can’t display it (yet)
• Traps the user on the page as they cant hear the Link List to navigate off the page
• And imagine the further horror if the video loops indefinitely!!
• Flash sites and loading pages are the devil…
• Reader cannot detect any content - utter silence and no way off the page
• “dot dot dot” is a really annoying convention
• See “ay-ay-ay” L
• JAWS identifies itself as Internet Explorer
• Querying User Agent is pointless

33. The screen reader’s silence is deafening

34. The screen reader cannot And the video offers the
be heard over this video reader no way of stopping it

35. Challenges for us as an agency

36. Potentially easy fixes
• Content hierarchy, page layout & structure
• Meaningful page titles
• Relevant headings – even on the homepage
• Linear content-grouping so page can be scanned
• Sensible use of image alt tags
• Sensible use of link anchor text
• How do we make all this fool-proof so clients using a CMS can’t
break all our carefully planned content?

37. The trickier issues
• Lack of triggers for DOM updates – how do we handle:
• Inline add to basket?
• Images & galleries in lightboxes?
• Login boxes as overlays?
• Smart/autocomplete search boxes
• Calendar & date picker controls
• How do we provide a rich, interactive and engaging experience for
non-visually impaired users while still making it a serviceable and
usable experience for visually impaired users?

38. The end
Thanks for listening J
A big thank you to Clare Davidson from SimpleUsability and
Barry Hill for an inspired talk on Accessibility In Practice; to
Northern User Experience (Leeds chapter) for hosting the
aforementioned talk; and to everyone who’s examples I have
pilfered (with credits) in this presentation.