Author: Builder.com 2005-01-04 10:42 AM
Comment - Accessibility is not just the duties of hardware. Software, such as the design of the Internet, to maximize the experience of people with visual obstacles in design. I know that I have talked about accessibility, but I just put the focus on the topic of hardware accessibility, for example, "The copier's button and the monitor are adjusted so that the operator sitting on the wheelchair can be easily How to view and operate? "However, there is a more universally in-depth example on" software ". A little backtracking to its history will certainly help us understand this problem. For people who blind and presence visual obstacles, Internet is a big treasure, with incredible information, which has not been able to obtain so much information before using personal computers and text readers. News, research papers, publications, and even speech can be made through the mouse to make it easy to make these Millions of pages and information on the Braille publication. From the perspective of work and production efficiency, people with visual obstacles have been greatly enriched, which certainly improved employees with disabilities to work satisfaction. However, ironically, from the perspective of media content, the richness of the Internet page has led to a serious decline in visual obstacles. I don't mean that we need to go back to the past, a pure text page, but saying that we need a little distance, rapidly improving the user's non-visual experience.
This is not only means using images on your web page, even short animations or MPEG video clips, you still need to take some time to consider naming mechanisms. For example, you can't graze a JPEG picture to "image1.jpg", is it named "Tree.jpg" or further "Apple Tree in Blossom.jpg (bloom Apple Tree .jpg) "Will it be better? In this way, when reading out by the text reader, the user has a better understanding of the content.
MPEG can also be named in the same way, you may also want to ensure that the included audio can communicate information related to visual content. I am sure that so far, many people in you will say "We all know this, this is a common sense of writing scripts." So just take a look at some of the HTML code of the web site, you will find that this common sense is not so common. I am very reluctant to admit that our laboratory's own web page is very bad in this regard, they are written by web designers employed by the laboratory. All of us is busy in the laboratory, so that we have no time to create and maintain your Web site.
I have to say that our website does have some examples of nothing. For example, the navigation button is written as "Button1" (Button 1) "and" Button2 "- without conveying the complete information to people with defective defects. We are now building a new website to make up for these and Other problems.
Although not deliberately proposes a problem that a visual obstacle may encounter, if you look at an example I found on IBM's Web site, it may be more likely to understand some, this example is quite clearly explained. Several questions and Its solution - http://www-306.ibm.com/able/solution_offerings/opera.html.
There are some tools on the Web to check the accessibility of the web page, but I must say that I have seen the best one is IBM's ADESigner, which can be downloaded below - Www.alphaworks.ibm.com/ Tech / adsigner.
Adesigner can simulate the Web accessibility of blind and people who have visual obstacles so you can master the possible problems. But for me, the best place in this program is that it can check if all web pages meet the requirements of accessibility guidance in a graphic. The link and text are displayed based on the "easy degree" of its access, the deeper the color of the highlight, the longer the color of the color, the blind person finds and uses the text reader to access the information. If your mouse is placed on a project, Adesigner also calculates how many seconds to use the text reader to access this. This tool is an excellent tool for all Web website designers.
More information about accessible guidance can be found in the link below - www.section508.gov and http://www.w3.org/wai/.
Steve Turvey is a laboratory manager in the RMIT IT Test Lab, his contact information is Stevet@rmit.edu.au.
