Improving Website Accessibility For the Disabled
In recent years this issue has come to light most predominately as a result of a several lawsuits involving websites that didn't provide a sufficient service to visually imparted users. One lawsuit currently in progress that may reach the Supreme Court in America involves a blind Florida man suing Southwest Airlines because he was unable to complete normal transaction on their site.
This case could also cite a previous case in Australia where a blind man won a ,000 settlement from the Olympic committee after he was unable to get tickets online. What this highlights overall is the growing need for websites to improve their accessibility to disabled patrons.
One key element that can be adapted to assist disabled users is the use of image alt tags. These are used to great extent by assistive devices to provide a fuller insight into what images are about and as such can be easily tailored to aid disabled users. By being provided more information via alt tags the users can appreciate the site a great deal more. If several images are used just as filler then the assistive devices can overlook them. This is provided that the alt has a NULL property set (i.e. alt="").
Another vital issue is in the navigation of the site. Assisting Tools will often function like screen readers and as such will read out the full navigation every time before the content. This can be easily sorted by adding a 'skip navigation' link that will allow the user to jump straight to the sites content on entering a new page.
In order to provide these and other features Lynx is a very effective website design tool. Lynx is a free text based browser that provides an insightful display of how disabled users will perceive your site. It does not support a variety of features like JavaScript and Flash and popups and is as a result ideally suited for disabled web visitors.
It is becoming increasingly important for web design to be tailored to assist disabled users and many sites are tailoring their search engine optimisation to fit whether its SEO abroad or SEO UK.
In the near future it looks like the vast majority of sites will have support in place for disabled users. With the ease of which it can be done it will most likely be sooner rather than later.
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