As you’ll have noticed in last month’s VSJ, one of the presentations at the upcoming Symposium is by Julie Howell of the RNIB. Council member John Ellis, FIAP sets the scene for her contribution here.
Recently I had to evaluate some Web sites for their accessibility to people with visual impairments. Why bother, you may ask, if they can’t see a screen? Well, first, someone can be registered blind but still have significant residual sight. And second, a little known (at least, less well known than it ought to be) Act of Parliament, the Disability Discrimination Act exists that imposes on us, the developers and designers of Web sites, a duty to provide access to those with any impairment. The Act includes any service, whether for the provision of information or to provide a purchase route.
The sad fact is that most Web sites (some of my own included) do not support any form of access for those with visual impairments, making those sites inaccessible to nearly 2 million potential customers. We are talking some big high street names here, folks! While organisations like the W3C and the RNIB try to promote best practice it seems to be failing to get down to the grass roots – US! From small independent developers and designers through to big corporate giants, many of us are missing the point. We need to make access easy.
So what are the issues? We need to break this down to the groups involved (I hope this is a broad enough for those with disabilities). We have the blind, visually impaired and those with motor problems. Each group has different requirements and even within those groups there are significant variations. Generally, those with motor or visual impairment problems will either have special keyboards or enhanced screen viewers to allow them to interact with their computers. While I know that isn’t 100% true, for the purposes of this article I will ignore this group. I plan a future article on the issues here.
For those who are blind there are some simple things we can do to aid the process. First, we need to understand the problem. Most of these users do not run Internet Explorer or Netscape. They have special browsers that convert pages into speech or Braille, processing only the text elements. These browsers read the pages left to right and top to bottom, including tables etc. They will interpret HTML formatting codes to inform the user of the page content.
There are, as always, limitations. Such browsers tend not to interpret frames. So we could create a site with no frames or two sites, the second being a frameless mirror, as it were. If we do have frames, we need to provide titles in the HTML so that suitably enabled browsers can tell the user what the frame is for, ‘Menu Frame’ or ‘Main Details Frame’, for example. As I mentioned, the browsers tend to read tables left to right, so using them to format a page can be disastrous in that they may read the page totally out of context. So it’s best to restrict table use to lists of figures and so on. You can also give the columns and rows titles that can be understood and interpreted.
The biggest issue is images. We all use graphics on our sites for impact. But that impact is lost on the blind user. It is, however, useful to know what the designer was trying to achieve, so adding an ALT tag to the image with a description, such as ‘Picture of the Queen’, gives the interpreter something to work with. Finally, using style sheets to describe your fonts and colours means that the browser doesn’t then interpret them, which makes the pages less confusing to the user. This confers some additional benefits. For example, partially sighted users can override your style sheet to allow them to define their own preferences. From a technical point of view, of course, the style sheet, if held a separate file is only downloaded once, reduces formatting in the Web page. This then reduces future page download times and improves performance, not to mention reducing the bandwidth required.
This just scratches the surface of the things we can do to help those who cannot see our work to be in a position, not just to understand our site, but possibly to visualise what we were trying to achieve. As Web sites move into their 3rd and 4th generations it is time for us to make them accessible not just because it is required by law, or because it can open up more sales opportunities but because it addresses the needs of a large number of people. I welcome any comments on the issue and will try to pick out individual items and expand on them in future articles.
You can contact John at john.ellis@wellis-technology.co.uk.
[Interesting project or development? Let us know at eo@iap.org.uk!]
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VSJ – March 2004 – Work in Progress
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VSJ – March 2004 – Members' News
University of Lincoln becomes IAP Education Partner
We are pleased to announce that the Institution has entered into a partnership arrangement with the University of Lincoln. This means that a range of courses offered by the University’s Faculty of Applied Computing Sciences will now be evaluated in terms of the IAP’s points system.
Mike Ryan, Director General of the Institution, said ‘This is good for Lincoln and good for us. From now on students will know in advance which of Lincoln’s courses to take if they want to become members of the IAP. This provides a new incentive for students to study at Lincoln. From the IAP’s viewpoint it provides a new source of courses that we can wholeheartedly recommend to the many people who call us for advice on training and IAP membership.’
Paul Reeve, Head of Department of Computing and Informatics in the Faculty of Applied Computing Sciences at Lincoln commented, ‘This is an excellent opportunity for students to enhance their academic qualification with a credential that has professional merit. The fact that students accumulate IAP credit at the unit level means that those on joint awards and those progressing through a programme can see an immediate and appropriate return on investment’.
Full details of these courses can be obtained through the Institution’s Education Officer, Robin Jones, at eo@iap.org.uk.
John Ellis (who writes elsewhere on these pages) and Raymond Butler are standing for re-election to the Council this year. They talk about themselves and their aims below.
I’m married with 4 children. I’ve been an IAP member since 1992 and in computing since 1977. My career began as a computer operator working on ICL and Honeywell mainframes for medium-sized computer bureaux and within a few years had progressed to programming primarily working in COBOL and RPG. These days, it’s VB and ASP but I still like the feel of a good COBOL program. I have been involved with systems ranging from Order Processing and Stock Control to Finance Systems in the retail/wholesale food industry. I spent 9 years in Local Government as an analyst/programmer and, finally, development manager. I was responsible for introducing Community Charge, Council Tax and Housing Benefit systems, plus most of the rest that goes with the territory. In later years I have been working on Insurance and Finance systems for software houses and financial institutions. Throughout my computing career I have been fortunate to be at the forefront of many new business applications, from the introduction of Barcodes in shops, introducing PCs to the business as a real tool to designing e-commerce solutions. In local government, I spent many years dragging them out of the dark ages into using desktop applications and VB to reduce costs and improve development times, opening the way for more efficient use of people and their time. While being currently employed by a financial institution, I also have business interests that include technical support, video-editing and software design companies and, of course, a Web design company. (They say the more you do, the more you can do.) As I am primarily an applications designer and programmer I feel I am probably well in the mainstream of IAP membership. I would like to see the IAP grow in terms of its membership and would continue to work to that aim by providing a timely information resource for members.John Ellis, FIAP
I originally trained in mechanical engineering, gaining my HNC in 1977. I moved into IT in the 1980s, and studied part-time for the Graduate Diploma in Computer Science at what was then South Bank Polytechnic, graduating in 1992. I joined the IAP in 1993. I spent a number of years providing user support for a range of DOS and Windows applications and carrying out database development in dBase and, later, Microsoft Access. I became involved in Web site development in the mid-90s, and also gained some experience of network administration. During the past few years I have become a ‘back-room boffin’, working on Unix, Windows NT and Open VMS systems, mainly concerned with file system and user account maintenance and Internet technologies. I do most of my programming in C and Perl. If re-elected, I would want to continue to enhance the range of services provided by the Institution and to encourage interaction amongst the membership.Raymond Butler, MIAP
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