Confirm accessibility of website for people with special needs

1. A SMALL PRESENTATION ON USER GROUPS WITH SPECIAL NEEDS AND GENERAL STANDARDS TO MAKE WEBSITES MORE ACCESSIBLE TO THESE USERS. BY ANDREW BLAKEMORE Confirm accessibility of website for people with special needs

2. Introduction • People with a variety of disabilities use the web. Not all websites are accessible to people with disabilities but websites can be made accessible rather easily and it is legally and morally responsible to make websites as accessible to as many people as possible. • In this presentation I will discuss ways to make a webpage accessible to people who suffer Blindness, Colour Blindness and deafness. I will also provide some guidelines in ways to create a webpage that is accessible.

3. Blindness • Blindness is a disability where people either see very little or not at all. It is especially difficult for people with blindness to access the web because most websites use visual displays to get there information across. There are ways however to make websites accessible to people with blindness. • One way is to make the website viewable by a screen reader. Some screen readers will output the information in brail using a small keypad device with small rods under the fingers. To make a website screen reader compatible you should always use the Alt”” attribute for images and other media elements that are important on the site. • You can also modify tables on the site by adding a caption for the table and headings for each column. You can also add the <table summary=“”> attribute to apply a brief explanation about what the table is about.

4. Checklist • Provide sound description of important information in video multimedia. • Provide a text equivalent for every non text item. • Use mark up language instead of images where possible. • Make sure there captions for the tables and headings for each column. • Use clear and simple language for sites content.

5. Colour Blindness • Colour Blindness is a common disability found in 8 percent of men and one percent of women. Colour Blindness is caused by a lack of sensitivity to certain colours. • To make a website accessible to people with colour blindness a website should be designed to be viewed in black and white with colour only used for emphasis. • Another way to make websites accessible to people with colour blindness is to control the colour of the text on the website using a style sheet. This way someone with colour blindness can apply there own style sheets when they view your site.

6. Checklist • Make page can be viewed with colour and without. • Use Style Sheets to control layout. • Make sure colour combinations have enough contrast to be seen by people with colour deficiently.

7. Deafness • There are many websites that use sound on the internet to get information across. This can make the websites not accessible to people with deafness. There are ways to make websites accessible. • Captions can be used to make websites accessible to people with blindness. There are two ways to put captions on a website. • SAMI or Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange is were a media player is embedded in the website and captions are displayed in a separate window. • SMIL or Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language is a tag based language based on XML that allows you to synchronise a video playing in a media player with caption in a separate window.

8. Checklist • Provide captions using SAMI or SMIL for any audio content on the website. • Provide transcripts where possible for audio content.

9. Colur Blindness Requirement • All web pages should be able to be viewed in colour and without. The best way to achieve this is to design your webpage to be viewed in black and white with colour only used for emphasis. But it is not easy to always know what is viewable for a colour blind person if you are not colour blind. There are some websites that will allow you to make sure your website is viewable. • http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/ will allow you to check your webpage and any images you wish to add. Below is an example. • You could also check using color doctor at http://www.fujitsu.com/global/accessibility/assistance/cd/download.html Normal Image Image through visicheck.com

10. My Presentation through Colour DoctorTitle Page

11. IntroductionShows conversion of text.