Web Accessibility
The following information is a presentation outline describing why and how to build Web sites that are more accessible to a wider range of people and devices. The information below is also available in PDF for printing and presentation.
January 2003
Frank Farm, Web & Data Services Manager
UCSF School of Pharmacy
Who needs accessibility?
Hearing
- Deaf: can't hear
- Hard-of-hearing or hearing-impaired: can hear only with amplification or can hear in one ear only
Vision
- Blind: can't see
- Visually-impaired: can't read small type or distinguish certain colors
- Color-blind: can't distinguish certain colors
Mobility
- Physical disability: unable to move one or more limbs, fingers,or toes
- Motor skills impairment: unable to press one key at a time, unable to press a key without duplicate keystrokes, unable to use a mouse
Learning
- Dyslexia: difficulty with reading
How many people is this?
It's estimated at 15%.
U.S. population = roughly 290 million people (15% = 43.5 million).
World population = roughly 6 billion people (15% = 900 million).
Are these people part of your audience?
Do men visit your site? About 8% of them are color-blind.
In the U.S., over 19 million adults reported having trouble with vision in a 1997 CDC survey.
In the same survey, over 28.7 million reported "a little trouble" with hearing and over 5.9 million reported "a lot of trouble or deaf."
What is Accessibility?
In real life:
- Hearing: closed captioning for films, sign language interpreters for live events
- Mobility: ramps, elevators, kneeling busses
- Vision: large print books, elevator buttons with braille
- Learning: special learning approaches/techniques
On the Web:
- Deaf & Hard-of-hearing: visual cues in addition to audio cues, captioning for multimedia (Flash animation, audio, video with sound), amplified headphones (Relevant only when your Web site contains sound.)
- Mobility: Navigation, Fitt's Law
- Blind: screen readers, dynamic braille printers
- Visually-impaired: use browser features to make font sizes larger or use screen magnification tools
- Color-blind: use stylesheets to force usable color preferences for text colors and page backgrounds
- Learning: Extremely difficult to address properly, even for today's Web experts in the field
Why Accessibility?
The Goal
To provide equivalent access of effective communication to everyone without imposing undue hardship and without fundamentally altering the program or service.
Understanding the Goal
- What is "equivalent access"?
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Wheelchair access to a building, "equivalent dignity"
- What is "effective communication"?
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Equally effective as with non-disabled visitors.
- What is "undue hardship"?
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Company would go bankrupt
- What is "fundamentally altering the program or service"?
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Elevators in the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
Publicity Reasons
- If UCSF is a medical sciences campus, why isn't it a leader in this health-related issue?
- Can you afford to lose or annoy 15% of your audience?
- If a disabled person has a bad experience with a UCSF Web site, what will he or she think of the people who run UCSF? What would you say if he or she were waiting to see you in your office?
The potential for bad publicity is real.
Legal Reasons
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1973: United States Section 504 (Rehabilitation Act)
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Bans discrimination based on disability in any program or activity that receives financial assistance from any federal agency
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1990: United States Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)
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Extends Section 504 to include places of public accommodation
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1998: United States Section 508 (Rehabilitation Act amendments)
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Extends Section 504 to include information technology.
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2002: California Senate Bill 105
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Affirms that United States Section 508 applies to California governmental entities using information technology.
Financial Reasons
- Do you budget for the costs of a disability lawsuit?
- Can you afford to risk losing a federal grant because your site is not accessible?
Ethical Reasons
Web accessibility is an issue of equal opportunity and discrimination.
Technical Reasons
- Standards and guidelines for the Web let disabled and non-disabled users benefit from the same data sources.
- The Web makes accessible communication very inexpensive and relatively easy.
How do we make accessible Web sites?
Educate People
More Effective
- Explain who, what, why, and how, then ask people to agree -- and commit -- to these changes.
- Provide resources to help people make the changes.
Less Effective
Impose mandates or legislation, then have people defend why they can't or won't change.
Web site sponsors
Web developers
- Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Guidelines
- Section 508
- How to use color-blind simulators
- How to make technology choices, design choices
- How to use accessibility-focused development tools
- How to find more information (widely available on the Web and in bookstores)
Include Accessibility in Your Budget
- Hardware and software tools
- Education and training
- Additional Web developers to balance the load
- Just like wheelchair ramps, it's smarter and less expensive to build in with a new project than it is to retrofit at a later date.
Expose Web Developers to Access Tools
Software
- Code validators
- Accessibility checkers
- Screen readers
- Screen enlargement tools
- Optical character recognition (OCR)
- Voice recognition
Hardware
- Document scanners
- Large monitors
- Braille printer
Test Your Sites With Disabled People
- Rose Resnick LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired
- Peninsula Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired
- Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic
- American Foundation for the Blind
- San Francisco Public Library
Best Fixes to Implement First
- Create valid code.
- Use
alt tags for all images (except spacer GIF images and other meaningless graphics).
- Use "skip navigation" links before all navigation bars.
Recommended Reading
More Information
There are too many other excellent sources to list concisely
and representatively. Google is your friend! For example:
Go To: Information for Web Developers
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Shortcut to This Page
To reach this page quickly or share it with others, use pharmacy.ucsf.edu/go/access, which redirects to a longer URL.
For printing and presentation
 Web Accessibility Presentation
Frank Farm
January 2003
PDF, 24 pages, 121 KB
Requires Adobe Reader
Other presentations
 Web Accessibility and Cascading Style Sheets: A Tutorial
Robin Sease and Aaron Calhoun
June 1999
Related Links
- Fangs: The Screen Reader Emulator - a Mozilla Firefox extension which creates a textual representation of a web page similar to how the page would be read by a modern screen reader.
- JAWS for Windows - a popular screen reader made by Freedom Scientific which reads aloud information displayed on the screen.
More Information
For more about Web accessibility, see Google Directory: web accessibility.
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