Considerate Accessibility
Written March 28, 2009. 8 comments.
When I got my first web development job more than 13 years ago I had only a vague clue what the term ‘accessibility’ meant, and no clue what it meant to develop for it. Like many other web developers these days we know what’s technically required to achieve an accessible web site, but there are some other things to consider post launch.
If you’re going to hand a CMS controlled site over to your client there is something you need to make them aware of, something I call Considerate Accessibility. The following information isn’t in the WCAG 2.0 spec or any standard in fact. It’s just based on my experience having built a web site for an organisation that is in the business of finding employment for people with disabilities, and recently started work on a site for another company that knows they have a high percentage of people with disabilities using their services.
That being said, you don’t have to know for a fact if you have an audience with certain disabilities to use adhere to these very basic principals.
These tips are based on the professional opinions of many experts in this field which has been adopted by many of my clients over the years, so I can’t take credit for them as much as I’d like to :-)
Abandon Click
A few years ago I made a decision to never use the word ‘click’ on anything I write online. The word ‘click’ implies the user is getting around the site with a mouse, which as we all know isn’t always the case. To people who use a keyboard, voice commands or some other way to navigate the web, the term ‘click’ is out of context for them. It’s completely meaningless.
So what’s a suitable alternative? For a little while I thought ‘hit’ would be a suitable replacement but soon realised that was no better. The truth is there should never be any reason to need for ‘click’ ‘hit’ or any other noun that describes a physical action. If you’re writing a new sentence just to introduce a link, you’re doing it wrong. Let me explain by example.
“Bill Gates is now the words richest man. Click here to view the original article”
The better way to construct the above sentence is:
“Bill Gates is now the worlds richest man“
Not only have you saved some characters, but you’ve eliminated the inconsiderate noun and given the link search engine meaning as a bonus.
Who Views?
If you’re getting the gist of what I’m on about then you probably noticed another inconsiderate noun in the previous example. If not, here’s a hint. Imagine you’re a blind user and your screen reading software reads aloud this sentence:
“View the original article about Bill Gates”
Do you see it? To a blind person, the term ‘view’ is also out of context. A blind person can not view anything – in the literal sense. Again to eliminate this conundrum the solution is exactly the same as described before:
“Bill Gates is now the worlds richest man“
There’s no need for inconsiderate nouns when your link is simply used in the right context.
Further reading: Fixing the ‘read more’ problem
Start of pageWho is That Web Guy?
Michael is a veteran web designer / developer / usability evangelist, practitioner of W3C guidelines, and currently head of the web dev unit at Stormbox, a branding and creative communications agency located in Perth, Western Australia.
In many cases, you will find that creating a link on the sentance’s own text will always be the best practice.