Accessibility in Design

The next time you open a Web browser, try this: don’t use your mouse.  Use your keyboard to navigate through your favorite site.  You may very well find that keyboard navigation is not at all straightforward.  On Yahoo.com, for example, you must press the Tab key over 75 times to get to all the options on the home page, and you must press the Tab key 10 times just to get to the main Search frame.  Many sites, such as those that extensively use Macromedia Flash, aren’t accessible using the keyboard at all.

To take another example: in your browser, turn off image downloading and look at your favorite page again.  Without the images, can you still use the page?  Jakob Nielsen (2000, 300-1) cites the page put up by Microsoft to advertise Bill Gates’ book Business At The Speed Of Thought.  When originally created, the page was composed of a number of images with no alternative text tags available.  Blind people who used a Web browser and screen reader to view the page would be read nothing but “image,” “image,” “image,” with no differentiation.  After an outcry, Microsoft reposted the page with the appropriate alternative text tags.

The problems described here are problems of accessibility.   In some cases, relatively minor changes can make the difference between an information design that can be used by anyone and a design that excludes people with certain disabilities – or preferences.

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Regarding Macromedia Flash, Geoffrey Sauer points out that Macromedia advertises that it’s possible to create keyboard-accessible Macromedia Flash content.  As of this writing, very few designers are adding this keyboard accessibility, and Macromedia itself recommends creating alternate content for disabled users before attempting to include accessible controls in Macromedia files (c.f. http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/productinfo/accessibility/flash_techniques/, note the first item).

Such equivalent content does satisfy accessibility requirements, but disability advocates would argue that Macromedia should make more of an effort to make accessibility easy and transparent within the Macromedia Flash 5 product.  This encourages designers to create accessible content without the extra effort needed to create separate, equivalent content.

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