The American Legion W.R.I.T.E.S

The American Legion Western Region Information & Technology Exchange Service.

This is a site is devoted to the free and open exchange of ideas and applications of pertinent information and technology to The American Legion.


Friday, May 15, 2009

Web Accessibility

When an architect designs a structure, accessibility to persons with physical impairments is always a consideration. Any public building must comply to the laws related to providing access to the physically impaired. Yet, when a Web designer creates a new site, Web accessibility is often not a consideration. In the U.S., the exceptions are Federal Government sites, which must comply with Section 508 guidelines, and some state sites.

I believe that it is imperative that every Web page designer treat Web accessibility with the same level of diligence as does an architect who designs a public building. For any Web site within The American Legion Family, Web accessibility is important for the following reasons:
  • As us older veterans age, we suffer a natural loss in visual accuity. To many, small fonts are no longer readable, and the ability to detect fine differences in contrasts declines.
  • There are many veterans who suffer some form of color blindness. While their color blindness may have limited the type of duty performed in the service, it did not prevent them from Serving Our Country.
  • Service related injuries may have resulted in visual or auditory impairments.
So that our Web sites serve all veterans, we need to do the following:
  • Design our sites using relative units, such as ems or percentages. The use of pixels as a measurement should be left to non-scalable elements, such as graphics.
  • The user should be able to control the default font size and default font from their browser. If scaled with relative measurements, a Web page should adjust according to the default font. For most browser's the default font size is 16 pixels, and the default font should be sans-serif. Serif fonts are just to hard to read by anyone with a visual impairment.
  • All images must use the alt tag, with a meaning full description of the image. If alt is not sufficient, use the longdesc tag.
  • Links should use the rel tag to describe the link, when the bounded text does not provide an adequate description.
  • Data tables must use headings and the heading need to include the scope tag to define the structure of the table to a screen reader.
  • Tables should not be used to provide structure for the Web page. This is a habit from the days when there was no other option. Today, we need to use other tags and style sheets to define the structure of a page.
  • A Web page must make navigational sense when the style sheet is not present. Screen readers read just the page, without the style sheet.
The above highlight the major considerations in designing a site to be accessible to the visually impaired. Giving control to the browser, allows the user to scale the font to the size that they can see. By using relative sizing, the page scales according to the font size.

Screen readers are used by the legally blind, and those with other severe visual impairments. A person who uses a screen reader may not even have a graphical terminal. The most common output of the screen reader is audio, while there is a smaller population that use braille devices. To understand the challenges these users face, just listen to a reader as it reads your Web page.

There are a number of on line tools for testing a Web Page. The Accessibility Guidelines page at mtlegion.org lists the tests I use in creating Web pages. If you want a quick test of your site, just change the default font size to 20 and see what happens to your site. Graphics do present an issue, so reducing the default size to less than 16 can render most sites unreadable.

Have I completed all the work on mtlegion.org to make it fully Web accessibile? The answer is no, but I keep working on it. My goal is to create a site that is accessible by every veteran that can use a computer to access the Internet.
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