Head Tale

Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day.

It’s a day to consider how people with disabilities experience the web, software, mobile devices, games and so on, targeted towards designers, developers, usability professionals and others without much experience with accessibility. There are public events scheduled all over the world, as well as other accessibility-related events. To participate on your own, try one of the suggested activities: turn off your mouse or trackpad and use only your keyboard to navigate websites, try using a free screen reader, such as NVDA for Windows or the built in VoiceOver for Mac and iOS, try watching some streaming videos or movies with captions or add some of your own to a video you’ve uploaded. Then relax with a sample of described video: Katniss, from the Hunger Games, goes hunting.

(via MetaFilter)

Although, I’ve always been aware of the importance of accessibility (which I interpret broadly – not just for say, visually impaired but people of different languages,intellectual abilities, the way you structure your layout, etc.)  in web design going back to my earliest days learning HTML in the late 1990’s, I’m not always the best practitioner.  For example, I rarely put ALT tags on my blog’s images even though that’s Accessibility 101 (I don’t do this probably out of pure laziness as much as anything.  It’s also partly due to a very rough cost-benefit analysis that the effort of doing so would probably not be worth it as its unlikely the few people who visit my site would benefit in any significant way and/or if someone who *does* have a need for these tags is probably used to going to sites without them.)

Of course, now that I work in Outreach Services where I work constantly with visually impaired people I feel like a bit of a dick for admitting that!

In fact, I literally had not one but two conversations with patrons just today about accessibility.  One pointed out how the pull-down menu that you use to select which of the province’s 10 library systems you belong to when logging into our e-book service don’t work with his screen reader software making the e-book site all but inaccessible to him.  Another came in to use our public access computer which is loaded with JAWS, ZoomText and other accessibility software.  But when he got to the SaskTel web site (he needed to re-set his Voice Mail password), the site’s colours and layout (not to mention simply how much information the site contains) made it very hard for him to find the spot he was looking for and then complete the password reset.

Obviously a problem that’s only going to get worse with an aging population (how many older patrons move to e-readers simply because they like being able to adjust font size without the “embarrassment” of taking out large print books)?