Christie Mason

I'm a big believer in simplier is better and it seems that simpler is also more accessabible and less of a barrier to many types of disabilities.

There are hints of what methods do/don't work in many of the threads and I thought it might be useful to create a top level topic to consolidate that info.

We can begin by summarizing some points based on  U.N. Gives Failing Accessibility Grades to the Planet's Top Web Sites
United Nations study finding only three leading Web sites around the world—out of 100 studied—meeting the needs of "persons with disabilities"

• Fail to provide adequate text descriptions for graphics - 93% 
  
• Rely on JavaScript or Flash for important functions and navigation - 73%
  
• Use pop-ups, which cause problems for those using screen magnification software - 87%
• Do not allow people to alter or resize fonts and/or images - 97%
• Use colors with poor contrast - 78%
• Offers poor page navigation -89% (I can't find out how they defined "poor navigation" perhaps navigation is like art - I know it when I see it)
  

Christie Mason

I'm a big believer in simplier is better and it seems that simpler is also more accessabible and less of a barrier to many types of disabilities.

There are hints of what methods do/don't work in many of the threads and I thought it might be useful to create a top level topic to consolidate that info.

We can begin by summarizing some points based on  U.N. Gives Failing Accessibility Grades to the Planet's Top Web Sites
United Nations study finding only three leading Web sites around the world—out of 100 studied—meeting the needs of "persons with disabilities"

• Fail to provide adequate text descriptions for graphics - 93% 
  
• Rely on JavaScript or Flash for important functions and navigation - 73%
  
• Use pop-ups, which cause problems for those using screen magnification software - 87%
• Do not allow people to alter or resize fonts and/or images - 97%
• Use colors with poor contrast - 78%
• Offers poor page navigation -89% (I can't find out how they defined "poor navigation" perhaps navigation is like art - I know it when I see it)
  

Christie Mason

Somewhere someone, not being able to easily find the who/where of that somewhere is an accessibility problem shared by all browser based threaded discussions, asked how to sell the need to focus on accessibility and disability compliance issues.

There are two ways to persuade someone - you either use pain (the stick)  or pleasure (the carrot).

Legal requirements are usually presented as a big stick to force organizations to comply, but it hasn't been an effective stick.  Very lax enforcement and no negative examples available of what happens when an entity doesn't care about making online presentations accessible.

But, that may be changing.  eCommerce quickly moved away from using Flash or other plugin dependent content when user's voted with their credit cards but it's only recently that they've been forced to consider the deeper impacts of inaccessible site design.  The Target lawsuit, studies showing negative online perceptions impacting the bottom line, the dismal ratings given by the U.N. are highlighting the problem on eCommerce sites, can eLearning be far behind?

What are the other sticks and carrots availble to persuade decision makers that a focus on usability is worthwhile?

Christie Mason

Somewhere someone, not being able to easily find the who/where of that somewhere is an accessibility problem shared by all browser based threaded discussions, asked how to sell the need to focus on accessibility and disability compliance issues.

There are two ways to persuade someone - you either use pain (the stick)  or pleasure (the carrot).

Legal requirements are usually presented as a big stick to force organizations to comply, but it hasn't been an effective stick.  Very lax enforcement and no negative examples available of what happens when an entity doesn't care about making online presentations accessible.

But, that may be changing.  eCommerce quickly moved away from using Flash or other plugin dependent content when user's voted with their credit cards but it's only recently that they've been forced to consider the deeper impacts of inaccessible site design.  The Target lawsuit, studies showing negative online perceptions impacting the bottom line, the dismal ratings given by the U.N. are highlighting the problem on eCommerce sites, can eLearning be far behind?

What are the other sticks and carrots availble to persuade decision makers that a focus on usability is worthwhile?

Christie Mason

I'm seeing comments regarding specific challenges of creating accessible online presentations, by product and process, buried in the introductions and thought it would be useful to begin a new thread to identify those challenges and collect practical suggestions on how to avoid those challenges.

I view the training and educational industry standards, SCORM etc, as anti-accessible. Most (all?) of the online authoring programs used by the training/educational (T & E) industries appear to continue to ignore accessibility issues, even though it's been a core focus of the web design community for years.

I wish I'd seen more web designers attracted to this discussion because, until AJAX, the concepts of making the web more usable had a strong alignment with making the web more accessible. Yes, the web design community did have "Flash Fever" for a while but that's long gone, except in T & E presentations. Web designers didn't stop using Flash and frames all the time for everything because of accessibility issues; they stopped because of pragmatic usability issues. If someone can’t use a page, understand how to navigate to that page, then that page has failed.

Try doing a "view source" on the page you're forced to use to enter a new topic  (if you're like me and have trouble finding it then click on this link http://tinyurl.com/ymmgrx,). How does this page adher to or ignore accessibility issues?  What's useful and not useful on this page and with the overall process? Look at the HTML source of this email, there’s not an alt attribute for the image (notice this is not an “alt tag” issue, “image” is the tag, “alt” is an attribute).   CSS is used but so are tables and embedded font styles along with deprecated tags.  Web standardistas would quibble about the links that open a new window but I think they're appropriate because some read their email in a browser.

Christie Mason