Accessibility... The Basics



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An accessible website is one that allows as many people as possible to access the infomation contained within it. An inportant subset of accessibility is allowing people with visual, aural, or physical disabilities full access to the information and services available in the same way as able-bodied people. Ensuring that your website is not dependant on particular hardware or software is also an important consideration when building accessible websites.

Is it worth it?


  • At least 10% of the population in most countries has disabilities; visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, and neurological disabilities can all affect access to the Web.
  • Average age of population in many countries is increasing; aging sometimes results in combinations of accessibility issues; vision & hearing changes, changes in dexterity & memory.
  • Many elderly and disabled people rely increasingly on the internet to obtain their goods and services.

Few organizations can afford to deliberately miss this market sector. On top of this, accessible web design contributes to advantages for able-bodies users too. Accessible websites:

  • Allow access to users of mobile phones, small display scress, Web-TV and web-kiosks and other new web=enabled devices.
  • Increases usability in low bandwidth or slow connection situations.
  • Provide access across a wider range of computer hardware and software.

Other extremely important benefits that make accessible websites worthwhile are that:


  • Many governments now require certain websites to conform to accessibility guidellines.
  • Accessible websites are easier to index by search engines and therefore help drive traffic to your site.


What does it entail?
Many techniques involved in making your website accessible will have no effect whatsoever on the final look and feel of your site for the majority of users. It will however allow users with disabilities to use assitive devices such as screen readers (to read text out aloud to them) and assistive input devices (for people with physical disabilities) to access and use your site. Some of the key concepts are:

  • To provide textual alternatives for all images and animations
  • To ensure that textual content can be resized to the users peronsal preference
  • To ensure sufficient contrast between text colour and background colour
  • To ensure that hyperlinks contain text that describes their purpose.
  • To ensure that hyperlinks are large enough to make them easy to select
  • To use a consistent and easy to navigate layout


Other benefits
The robots that search engines use to catalogue your website are essentially 'blind' visitors to your site. Accessible websites are therefore more search engine friendly and result in better search engine rankings and ultimately more visitors to your site. Other advantages include:


  • Better structure means easier and cheaper site maintenance
  • Accessible sites demonstrate that your organiation takes its social responsibilty seriously
  • Increased support for internationalisation
  • Reduces hosting costs

I believe accessibility is beneficial for all involved and should be a consideration of every website.



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This post comes a bit late in the whole web 2.0 cycle. I feel that it bears repeating because I have come across sites that don't follow some basic principles when pulling in 3rd party data from sites such as flickr, twitter et. al.

APIs and data portability

The blessing of popular and easy to use APIs and the data portability of web 2.0 applications has had an unfortunate side effect, and that is that some implementations that use these services do not integrate appropriate contingency design should these 3rd party services fail.

Caching data calls to APIs is a good bit of contingency design. Many APIs will require caching - like that of Amazon - but I suspect this is intended to help limit resource use of the API host, not the site using the API. The reasons a person using API accessed data on their website would want to cache the data are:

  1. To speed up the load time of their website
  2. To have a back up plan if the API call fails

A simple implementation to handle those two cases would be one that caches an API call for a given amount of time and one that freshens stale cached data and triggers an error should an API call fail.

Caching is good contingency design practice

As I said above, this post is a bit late to the party but it is worth writing as recently I have come upon at least three sites where firebug and other widgets have revealed issues retrieving API fetched data and the site loading times have been horrible.

A decent implementation idea would be to roll your own caching wrapper and agnostically plug it in to a stable caching tool, perhaps something like Cache Lite for PHP. In this manner you have a reusable, caching library independent piece of code that can handle caching/flushing and refreshing of data which could function to handle the two cases discussed above.

And that's it. It's been 541 days since my last post. Wow. I hope this is a re-start of a new phase of blogging. Right, and it looks like I had not built the commenting functionality into this version of the site. What a surprise. I'd still like feedback so if anyone has any email me at mike at this domain and I'll pop a comment right into the database. Off to build some commenting functionality... Comments should be working now.



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