Accessibility

[Chisa]

I've been doing a lot of research for work lately in the area of accessibility on the web. As designers we tend to like to make things look as pretty as possible - sometimes at the cost of how easy something is to understand. It's easy to forget that not everyone is as capable as you, and for your site to be able to reach an audience without discriminating you have to take into account that people looking at your site may have vision impairments, motor impairments, colour blindness, learning disabilities...

So, was just wondering if other people here take into account these things, and if so you do you deal with them? Do you think we should be taking relevant precautions with print design as well?

At work at the moment we've decided that the limitations from making a site accessible are too restrictive, so have compromised by using a style switcher for people with bad vision, similar to the one BBC has in their web accessibility study.

Further reading:
Accessibility Colour Wheel - shows how the 3 most common forms of colour blindness affect vision
BBC Accessibility Checklist
Why developers hate the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0  

[rogue_designer]

I certainly take into account color blindness, and easy of navigation.

I always try to make sure that images have txt tags that are searchable, and readable for vision impaired browsers. Especially if I've used text in a graphic to convey important information - I make sure there is alt text provided.

low source images for bandwidth impaired browsers wink

And I try to ensure that my CSS - while pretty, still allows for people to adjust the text sizes for their own usability needs (hopefully without breaking my design apart).

--

It's not an easy balance to draw. But ultimately, good information design will NOT be difficult to use and understand. If it is, we've failed in one of our principle roles as designers.  

[DaveTheGiant]

my websites are usually low-medium traffic sites. While i think accessibility is important on bigger sites i question its need on small sites where the number of people with disabilities is very low.  

[Catani]

it's not a factor i have taken in any of my designs really =_=;;;;

but in reality the only sensible(=easy) way to make it more acesible and not using whole php/asp engine is making the style switcher, as there are no tools to make it work - something like browsers automaticly taking different style sheets
though i understand the reason behind the WCAG 2.0 after the article about it i won't even try to get through it - i don't really se a reson to do so, it looks like it's mostly rubbish that has got not much practical use (especially the part about no need for the wcag compatible page to be valid html page - wtf o_0 and that's a w3c stnadard?!? )

and for the color blindness - i spent some time at the color wheel site (fun fun, fun... ^^) trying to make unreadable combinations. my conclusion is:
- dont use green+orange, orange-red
- dont use blue+purple
- even using those colors makes it readable if u use them with apropriate lightness contrast
- every thing else = just changes the look of the site no the readability