1 Search Engines vs. Accessibility

I’m not an accessibility expert (yet), but after reading the article, it seems to me difficult to make search engine optimization (the white hat one) and accessibility fit together. For search engines it’s important to make the title tag different on every page and also a good description of the content. So what different information should I put into the H1 tag? Also for search engines I would always put content first, navigation to the end. How can I provide a way for blind users, to reach navigation fast? Should I place a link at the top to go to navigation?

posted at 05:57 am on October 10, 2006 by Java Boy

2 Search Engines with accessibility

Java Boy, I think making your sites accessible at first is good for search engines. There might be some difficulty with advanced SEO techniques, but basic site optimization for accessibility makes the content more readable for the sight disabled as well as for the bots.

As there are many different kinds of disabilities there cannot be one perfect style of making the web site accessible. I’m pretty sure that the blind have different requirements than the low-vision users.

posted at 06:05 am on October 10, 2006 by Handy Andy

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Interesting read, Kevin. The section on boldness was a surprise to me.

Still, an obvious example of someone who puts testing first is Jakob Nielsen .

I’ve always disagreed with content before navigation. If the reason is to read page content without having to skip navigation, then great, but now you have to skip content to use the navigation—so any benefit is arguable. And as you pointed out, it breaks convention—an important part of an easy-to-use design.

posted at 06:35 am on October 10, 2006 by Chris Botman

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In fact, expectations would be a better word than convention.

posted at 06:40 am on October 10, 2006 by Chris Botman

5 Research in numbers

A great article. The danger is however that the behaviour of some is extrapollated to general guidelines. If research is done, it is vital that there will be enough represents in every ‘group’ of disabilities to be able to do some number crunching (as your sociologist will probably agree on).

The challenges is of course to get homogeneous groups (that in itself is probably quite a discussion: is it on behaviour or on disability?) and to have repetitive research that can be conducted world wide.

As far as technology goed: I guess a lot of information has to be directed to user groups that they can get better tools than Internet Explorer; it should be a two way street: web site makers building better sites and people educating themselves on getting a better experience for themselves using tools available right now.

posted at 06:46 am on October 10, 2006 by Martijn ten Napel

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I had to work on an accessible redesign of a big payment system here where i work, we tried to do some testing and research but, as usual, time and budget skyrocketed and they dediced to cut on the testing phase (fortunately it looks like we got things quite right, since we don’t get big complaints about it from quite a big audience)...

Anyway, after reading the article, especially the part about text weight, i started wondering a little about the fact that making a site accessible to users with disabilities can be an impairing to other users: think about the bold issue, usually bold is correlated with semantic tags, like strong and headings and it’s used to put emphasys on important text in the middle of long expanses of text, to make them more readable. Now imagine a page of text with all the text bolded, it would be quite hard to read. And it would be semantically incorrect (contrasting with some of the rules in the WCAG).

Examples like the google page in the article could work correctly, but i doubt it could be considered a good general rule to always have “all-bolded” text.

One workaround could be using different media types for the stylesheet but since low-vision user usually use a normal browser this could be hard. There are tricks to read the font size and apply different styles if needed, but they rely on javascript so they can’t really be considered accessible…

I don’t know, but everytime i think about accessible design i get struck in this kind of loopholese…

Regards Marcello

posted at 08:18 am on October 10, 2006 by Echo Mirage

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Marcello, I totally agree that semantic markup (like strong, em) should be used to used to describe the structure of a text, not to make everything bold and therefore more readable to low-vision visitors. I think most web sites are almost unaccessible for sight disabled users so they will be glad about every page that complies to basic accessibility standards. As a commercial website you have to remember the 80-20-rule…

posted at 08:32 am on October 10, 2006 by Andreas Berg

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Isn’t it pretty standard for users with visual disabilities to over-ride page styles with their own style settings? So making all text bold for example shouldn’t be an issue.

posted at 08:46 am on October 10, 2006 by Chris Webster

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Very good article. I am in complete agreement on this. It’s truely a hinder that there is so little information available on accessibility. It is a big hinder in developement. Guidelines, all nice and well but a conclusion is nothing without the research it was build upon. As developer it is nearly impossible to make our own judgement based upon a conclusion.

posted at 09:51 am on October 10, 2006 by Wilco Fiers

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Chris, you’re right, i didn’t consider that possibility. Probably it isn’t the “correct” solution to the problem, it’s more of a workaround, but it could help (plus i doubt a really correct solution exists).

As some browsers let the user choose from different CSS one could publish a slightly different CSS containing only the “bolding” statements and let the user switch.

Regards Marcello

posted at 09:55 am on October 10, 2006 by Echo Mirage