This blog [post] by Marian Foley is the first in a series of blog posts about people with access needs. The aim of the series is to raise awareness of the different ways people access websites, common issues faced and what designers and developers can do to remove the issues.
Marian Foley, content designer and particular needs IT user spoke to us about the problems she faces, and her solutions. Most importantly, she answers the question – how can we make the web more accessible?
…
What should content designers and developers be doing?
The most obvious thing for me is to use Responsive Web Design (RWD). This solves the problem of websites not fitting on my screen and I can access the same options as everyone else. Since RWD became mainstream around 2012/13 I’ve been able to use the mobile versions of most websites (including GOV.UK and the backend of GOV.UK). I’m a big fan!
Design accessible websites by:
1 making your layout clear and simple
2 having menus at the top of the page, on the left if possible, so that people using a low resolution find them quickly
3 using .png files for diagrams because they’re transparent; someone using their own colour scheme will see their colour preference as the background colour
4 providing text alongside icons and images to explain what’s going on
5 publishing HTML pages, not .pdf files, because they’re accessible to more users
6 taking alternative text attributes off diagrams and putting them on the page; people who don’t use screen readers but can’t read the text in your image won’t miss out (use “” in the alt text field because you’ll no longer need any)
…
Curated by (Lifekludger)
Read full article at Source: Accessibility and me: Marian Foley | Accessibility
life tools 