Maximum Accessibility: Making Your Web Site More Usable for Everyone

Accessibility is now a legal requirement for all national government Web sites in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and the European Union. Throughout the world, many other organizations--universities, schools, and private companies--are recognizing that accessibility is a moral and business imperative; many are adopting policies aimed at making Web resources accessible to the more than six hundred million people with disabilities worldwide.

Maximum Accessibility is a comprehensive resource for creating Web sites that comply with new U.S. accessibility standards and conform to the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. This book offers an overview of key issues, discusses the standards in depth, and presents practical design techniques, up-to-date technologies, and testing methods to implement these standards for maximum accessibility. You will learn how to:

• Write effective text equivalents for images and audio files
• Caption soundtracks and describe the action of videos and animation
• Set up data and layout tables that make sense to the ear and eye
• Design Web forms that people can interact with via the keyboard and other input devices
• Label forms so that people who use talking browsers can give the right information at the right time
• Make scripts accessible to people who don't use a mouse
• Create simple PDF files that are accessible to people with disabilities
• Use cascading style sheets to make your thoroughly accessible pages look great

Throughout the book, case studies illustrate how inadvertent accessibility barriers on major Web sites affect the ability of people with disabilities to locate information, participate in e-commerce, and explore the richness of the Web. These case studies demonstrate how certain design features can make access much harder, and how other features can greatly ease the use of a page or site.

Most of all, this leading-edge guide reveals that a little extra design consideration up front can help you create a site that is not only a pleasure for people with disabilities, but attractive and pleasing for all interested users. In short, Maximum Accessibility shows why good design is accessible design.

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Index

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Index

Preface

Maximum Accessibility is about making the World Wide Web more accessible and more usable for everyone, including approximately 750 million people around the world who have disabilities. That includes 54 million Americans (almost 6 million of whom are children) and 37 million people in Europe. We've written Maximum Accessibility for Web designers, developers, and programmers creating complex, data-driven Web applications; full-time Webmasters; folks who manage their departmental Web sites with one hand and do full time jobs with the other; production managers; people who commission the creation of Web resources for their organizations; people who provide community services in community technology centers, nonprofit agencies, and health care facilities; teachers who want to help students learn and get parents involved in their children's education; and, finally, anyone who's interested in creating Web sites that can reach lots of people or showing others how to do it and helping them understand why.

We assume that you're involved in some way in creating Web pages. This involvement can take many forms, from creating a personal Web site to building huge sites for Fortune 500 companies, to posting occasional updates to a small site for your department or a community organization you belong to. Perhaps you train Web developers, or include a unit on Web-authoring in a course you teach. If you know something about HTML, the underlying language of the Web, you'll appreciate our discussions of the way some pages work (or where they break down). But if HTML isn't your cup of tea, you'll still find plenty to interest you in the examples we've selected and in our explanations of how different aspects of Web design affect people who have disabilities. If you're familiar with disability issues and have been searching for ways to persuade colleagues, managers, or service providers to address the accessibility concerns you've raised, we think you'll find helpful material in this book. If disability is a new topic for you, Maximum Accessibility is a good place to start.

Maximum Accessibility is divided into two sections. In the first section, we answer the question, "What is accessibility and why does it matter?" Here you'll find four chapters that provide a good working definition of accessibility and discuss relevant issues of law and policy such as the Americans with Disabilities Act. You'll learn about the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 and the Section 508 federal standards, and how they apply. You'll also learn how accessibility awareness can have a positive impact in your community. And you'll get the information you need to make a strong business case for accessibility in your own organization and to your customers.

Interspersed among these chapters are four "user experience" chapters that offer detailed case studies, in readable narrative form, to demonstrate how inadvertent accessibility barriers on major Web sites affect the ability of people with disabilities to successfully locate information, explore our rich cultural heritage, and participate in e-commerce. You'll learn how specific features make access harder--and how other features can help. You'll see the accessibility guidelines and standards as they apply to real people using real Web sites.

In Section Two we'll show you how to use those same guidelines and standards to anticipate accessibility challenges and turn them into good design solutions--solutions that work for all your users. You'll learn about combining multiple approaches (and multiple media!) to create rich, equivalent alternatives for the content on your Web site. We'll show you how to write effective text equivalents for images and audio files; how to caption the soundtracks and describe the action of videos and animations so that people who aren't in a position to see or hear what's happening on the screen can still follow the important points of what's being said and done. You'll learn how to set up data and layout tables that make sense to the ear and the eye, so people listening to your Web site or looking at it on a text-only display will be able to find the information they need and understand what it means. You'll learn how to design Web forms that people can interact with via the keyboard (or any assistive technology device that translates user input into keystrokes--including voice recognition), and you'll learn how to label your forms so that people who use talking browsers know what information they need to give you. You'll learn what you need to do to make scripts accessible to people who don't use a mouse, and how to decide which multimedia player is best for your purposes and your audience. You'll learn how you can create simple PDF files that are accessible to people with disabilities. And you'll learn how to use Cascading Style Sheets to make your pages look great and be accessible!

If you're new to accessibility, we suggest that you start with Section 1 to learn about what accessibility is and why it's important. If you're a Web developer, you may want to read the user experience chapters before moving on to the "how-to" chapters in Section 2. (We've even provided a handy chart to show you which accessibility guidelines and standards are covered in each chapter, so if you're interested in specific issues you'll be able to use the chart to follow up). Managers and others who commission Web sites may want to pay special attention to the chapters on accessibility in law and policy and on the business case for accessibility. Those who teach Web authoring will find the detailed examples and explanations throughout the book especially useful.

Maximum Accessibility has many features to help you learn what you need to know. It offers:

• In-depth coverage of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 and the Section 508 federal accessibility standards for the Internet
• Information on building a strong business case for accessibility
• Detailed user experience narratives that bring accessibility barriers to life
• Best practices in accessible design
• Screen shots, screen reader transcripts, and code examples that provide in-depth understanding
• How-to chapters that demonstrate the process of thinking through design problems with accessibility in mind
• Up to date information about assistive technologies and design techniques

After reading this book, you'll become a more valuable resource to colleagues in your organization and to your community. You'll have up to date knowledge of accessibility guidelines and standards and how they apply to your situation. You'll be able to solve accessibility problems--before users with disabilities point them out! You'll know how to write accessibility into requirements documents, RFQs, and contracts. Your Web sites will provide more satisfying experiences for more people. And you'll gain insight into one of the most interesting and challenging issues of our time: how to enable people with disabilities to participate fully in and contribute to society.

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Foreword

Accessibility and usability are two tightly intertwined concepts. The first important relationship is that increased accessibility for users with disabilities almost always leads directly to improved usability for all users. Guideline number one for all user interface design has always been simplicity. This is true whether designing for blind users, old users, children, international users, mobile users, soldiers on the battlefield, or even the average business executive accessing a Web site or the company intranet on a laptop over a slow modem line from a hotel room during a business trip. Simplicity helps everybody.

Going beyond simplicity, the primary goal of the specific accessibility guidelines discussed in this book may be to help users with disabilities, but most of the guidelines will also improve usability for many other groups of users.

The second significant connection between accessibility and usability is the importance of focusing on the performance, ease of use, and ease of learning for actual users when designing Web sites to accommodate users with disabilities. It is not enough that users are capable of accessing a Web site or intranet. It must also be easy, fast, and pleasant to do so, and the interaction must minimize the probability for user error. If you can get in but it's a pain to be there, then users will not feel welcome. It's better to be allowed in than to be kept out, but it's even better when the user experience during the visit is pleasant and productive.

In a study my group conducted recently, we found that current Web sites are three times harder to use for people with disabilities than for our control group of users without disabilities. (Details are at http://www.nngroup.com/reports, from which you can download the full report.)

A second study of senior citizens had a less dramatic but still remarkable outcome: current Web sites are twice as difficult for people older than 65 years to use than for younger users. (You can find details at the Web page mentioned above.) The seniors in our study were not disabled in the traditional sense of the word, and they certainly were able to access the Web sites in the sense that they could get the pages to display, yet the complexity of the designs created major obstacles for them.

If we could get Web designers to consider accessibility as a design goal from the beginning, we could help users in many categories become much more productive in their use of Web sites and intranets without adding to the expense of constructing the design. In fact, simpler designs are often cheaper to build, though they may take more up-front thinking and creativity to plan.

I particularly like the user experience case studies in this book. Reading through these chapters gives great insight into the frustrations users feel when they come across designs that are difficult--or impossible--to use. I encourage you to read the case studies, but I encourage you even more to conduct similar tests of your own designs.

User testing is quite simple to do and always reveals a long list of changes that will improve a design and increase its business value dramatically. Conducting a usability evaluation with users with disabilities is slightly more complex than running a traditional user-testing session because of the need to allow each user to employ the assistive technology to which he or she is accustomed. But it's not that hard: you can go to the users' offices or homes and use their existing setups. The key elements of user testing remain the same. First, get hold of real users--your customers for a Web site or your employees for an intranet. Second, have them sit by the computer and access your design while they perform representative tasks. Ask the users to think out loud so you can find out how they react to each design element and why they take certain paths through the user interface. The third point may be the hardest: you have to shut up and let the users do the talking. Even when they really don't like your site. It's better that you learn this in a study rather than after you have released a design that will hurt your reputation and cost you lost business. Ultimately, the lessons of this book should increase your understanding of the importance of the user experience and provide you with practical resources to improve that experience for everyone who visits the sites you create.

--Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D.
Nielsen Norman Group
Mountain View, CA
April 2002

Table of Contents

Foreword.


Preface.


Acknowledgments.


A Word about Screen Readers.

SECTION 1: ACCESSIBILITY AND WHY IT MATTERS.

SECTION 2: STRATEGIES AND TECHNIQUES FOR MAXIMUM ACCESSIBILITY.

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