Designing Web Sites to be Disability Friendly

Lisa Seeman

September 8, 2000

Sometimes when a thing is right, it is right in all the ways you can imagine. Say for example, you want to do a good thing and help people with disabilities. So you read this article and make your web page more accessible. Then your traffic goes up. Reward from heaven? Possibly, but certainly logic plays a part - you have made your site accessible to a large proportion of the population who have limited web access. Over 15% of the population have a learning disability (LD). In addition, a sizable percentage of the population is physically challenged or has related problems.

Making your page accessible means bearing in mind that not all of the visitors to your web site will be viewing it on a monitor and navigating with a mouse. Some will be having your page read to them by a speech synthesizer. Others will be using a Braille reader. Some people may be using a specialized input device or keyboard. Some folks just have trouble reading and get distracted easily. Some are color-impaired. A clear, well-formatted site, with easy words, can make it easier on everyone.

If you must have a site with ants crawling across a screen and the words falling out of hot air balloons, then learn how to provide textual equivalent for any non accessible content.

The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) is an initiative by W3 to make the internet usable for people with disabilities. Most of their guidelines are easy to implement, without detracting from the general style and look of your page. Where there may be a conflict, (using big fonts, etc.) I have made some tools to help you get the look you want while increasing your site's accessibility.

And when you have made your sites disability friendly, tell me about it, and I will put you on my disability friendly links page.

Designing Web Sites to be Disability Friendly

Contents: