Transcript PJG_Presentation_Feb_2006 - Boston-IA

Highlights of Accessibility Issues
for Editors
Presentation by P.J. Gardner
Bringing Information Architecture and Internet Accessibility Together
© 2006 Gardner Information Design, Inc.
Outline
•
Introduction
•
Preparing Accessible Text
•
Converting Text for Accessibility
•
Web Coding for Accessibility
•
Testing for Web Accessibility
•
Conclusion
© 2006 Gardner Information Design, Inc.
Introduction
Truisms about Online Content:
•
"People do not read web sites or user interfaces,
they scan them."
•
"When people need to read large amounts of text
on screen, they print it."
•
"When people are overwhelmed with too much
information or not enough information—or they
have to wait too long—they go elsewhere."
© 2006 Gardner Information Design, Inc.
Who Are You?
• Editor on a team creating content for the Web, an
application, or a Help system.
• Editor or author for multi-sourced print documents that also
end up in electronic form.
• Author or content producer of online content specifically
created for the Web.
• Author or editor for material to be placed in a content
management system.
• "Webmaster" of a small web site, intranet, or non-profit web
site.
• The owner of a do-it-yourself web site to promote your own
services.
© 2006 Gardner Information Design, Inc.
Accessibility Goals for a
Content Producer
Accessibility Goals for a Content Producer or Editor:
•
To make sure everyone has access to online
content.
•
To get information across without overwhelming
or frustrating people.
For this presentation, we will focus on Web sites.
© 2006 Gardner Information Design, Inc.
What is Accessibility?
What does Accessibility mean?
• Access by people with physical impairments and
disabilities.
• Access by people with functional or technological
barriers.
• Access by anyone outside the imagined target
audience.
• Access by senior citizens and Baby Boomers with
aging eyes.
© 2006 Gardner Information Design, Inc.
Potential Accessibility
Audiences
Some of the people to think about when preparing text for
online presentation:
– People who are blind (using screen readers).
– People with low vision impairments.
– People who are colorblind.
– The growing population of senior citizens online.
– People with mobility impairments.
– People who have learning disabilities.
– Non-native speakers of English.
– People with hearing impairments.
– People with older equipment or software.
© 2006 Gardner Information Design, Inc.
Access Needs
For people with physical disabilities or other access
needs, difficulties with on-screen text are compounded:
– Blind people using screen readers must listen to
text.
– People with vision impairments must enlarge text.
– People with mobility impairments must tab or
point to text.
– People who are non-native speakers of English or
cognitively impaired must be able to comprehend
the text.
© 2006 Gardner Information Design, Inc.
How Much Accessibility
is Enough?
"Text is accessible when the barriers to
accessing it have been removed." —PJG
The basic keys to content accessibility are to:
• Make sure text is really text.
• Make it easy to get to.
• Make it easy to read on-line.
© 2006 Gardner Information Design, Inc.
How Much Control
Do You Have?
• You may turn text over to others for online delivery.
• Other people may put your carefully crafted text into a
web page or an application window for you.
• Formats like PDF (Portable Document Format) or
online Help may not be inherently accessible.
• Content management systems may insulate you from
the delivery method completely.
The more you know about accessibility needs, the
more you can advocate to make online text
accessible.
© 2006 Gardner Information Design, Inc.
Preparing Accessible Text
(1)
• Is the text clear?
• Is it as concise as possible?
• Is there a minimum of jargon or culturally
biased terminology?
• Could it be easily translated into another
language?
• Would it still make sense if read over a
telephone?
© 2006 Gardner Information Design, Inc.
Preparing Accessible Text
(2)
• Is there a logical structure to the document
and each subdivision?
• Does the document include a clear context or
summary statement at the beginning of each
major section?
• Is the document as internally consistent as
possible?
• Are there clear heading divisions?
© 2006 Gardner Information Design, Inc.
Preparing Accessible Text
(3)
• Do the headings make sense out of context?
• Do the headings begin with keywords or
action verbs?
• Do headings begin with a variety of letters?
• Is the information in the document "chunked"
using paragraphs, bulleted and numbered
lists, tables, etc.?
© 2006 Gardner Information Design, Inc.
Preparing Accessible Text
(4)
• Does the text contain as many keywords
related to the topic as possible (for search
optimization)?
• Are acronyms and abbreviations spelled out
the first time they will appear in each potential
Web page and included in parentheses?
• Are boldface and italics used for emphasis
rather than for visual effects?
© 2006 Gardner Information Design, Inc.
Preparing Accessible Text
(5)
• Are tables organized from left to right with
clear headings, preferably for both columns
and rows?
• If created in a word-processing program, does
the document use template styles consistently
and correctly?
• Are platform-specific features included in the
document (for example, curly quotation marks
or em dashes)? [If so note them.]
© 2006 Gardner Information Design, Inc.
Preparing Accessible Text
(6)
And a couple of controversial ones of my own for
Web delivery:
• Are paragraphs no more than a sentence or
two?
• Are commas included before conjunctions in all
series of items?
• Is closing punctuation kept outside quotation
marks for technical terms and phrases?
© 2006 Gardner Information Design, Inc.
Converting Text for
Accessibility (1)
The goal when converting text is to make it:
• Truly text-based, not image-based.
• Text that can be repurposed in any
environment.
• Platform-independent and browserindependent.
© 2006 Gardner Information Design, Inc.
Converting Text for
Accessibility (2)
My favorite conversion tool is Notepad!
• Removes platform-specific formatting.
• Displays text in reading order.
• Quickly identifies special characters.
I can then paste text into my Web editor and
apply HTML tags to identify the purpose of each
piece of text (heading, paragraph, list item, table
cell, etc.), not what it should look like.
© 2006 Gardner Information Design, Inc.
Converting Text for
Accessibility (3)
•
Do not use the "Save as HTML" features of Microsoft
Office products.
•
They contain HTML syntax errors and bloated style
information.
•
It is actually easier to insert the correct tags on plain
text than to remove the extraneous information
inserted by Microsoft Office.
•
Many high-end conversion tools use style information,
so correctly styling word-processing documents pays
off when converting for Web delivery.
© 2006 Gardner Information Design, Inc.
Web Coding for
Accessibility (1)
•
Follow W3C or Section 508 coding standards strictly.
•
Learn the differences between HTML and XHTML
(see XHTML Conversion Checklist handout).
•
At a minimum, learn how to read XHTML!
•
If possible, use XHTML to code new pages or to
convert existing pages.
•
There are not many text tags to learn (see Modular
XHTML Tags handout).
•
Believe it or not, follow the rules and accessibility will
almost happen.
© 2006 Gardner Information Design, Inc.
Web Coding for
Accessibility (2)
Some of the typical rules you've heard before:
•
Use "semantic markup": use tags to identify what
things are, rather than what they should look like.
•
Separate presentation from content using cascading
style sheets.
•
Avoid font tags and other deprecated features for
formatting.
•
Avoid tables for layout and do not nest tables.
What follows is more related to content coding.
© 2006 Gardner Information Design, Inc.
Web Coding for
Accessibility (3)
•
Be as consistent as possible in placing standard
items on each page.
•
Ensure that HTML order matches the text reading
order. (Use style sheet positioning if you need to
change the display order.)
•
Ensure that the title in the Head section on every
page is clear enough for search engines (5 to 15
words) and contains as many search keywords as
possible.
•
Make sure the meta tag description describes the
page (and site) accurately and clearly enough for
search engines.
© 2006 Gardner Information Design, Inc.
Web Coding for
Accessibility (4)
•
Write clear alt text for figures and images (maximum
150 characters).
•
Describe the purpose of an image rather than what it
looks like.
•
Use null alt text for images that contain no
information, so that they can be skipped.
•
Insert no more than 100 links per page.
•
Make sure link text is clear if taken out of context, and
that links begin with keywords and a variety of initial
letters.
© 2006 Gardner Information Design, Inc.
Web Coding for
Accessibility (5)
•
Add title attributes to links that need clarification and
to indicate when links go off-site or open new
windows.
•
Ensure that headings are coded with H1 through H6
tags.
•
Make sure that special characters work on as many
platforms as possible (see the Special Characters
handout).
•
Use em and strong tags for emphasis, and style
sheets for bold and italic.
© 2006 Gardner Information Design, Inc.
Web Coding for
Accessibility (6)
•
Add summary descriptions for data tables, and use
table header tags to indicate whether headers apply
to rows or columns.
•
Make sure that form fields and options are associated
with their labels using the label tag.
•
When required, use client-side image maps and make
sure there is clear alt text for each area within the
map.
•
For detailed images, supply a separate file for a long
description of the image, with a [d] link until more
browsers support the longdesc attribute.
© 2006 Gardner Information Design, Inc.
Testing for Accessibility
(1)
• Even one test with a user with a disability will
teach you a great deal.
• Try my low-tech accessibility test (see Web
Site Testing for Accessibility handout).
• Visit Boston-IA.org for more information about
testing for accessibility at:
http://www.boston-ia.org/resources/links.html
•
(See the next page for a few of them).
© 2006 Gardner Information Design, Inc.
Testing for Accessibility
(2)
•
W3C WAI guidelines
(http://www.w3.org/WAI/Resources/)
•
WebAIM Wave
(http://www.wave.webaim.org/index.jsp)
•
WebXACT
(http://webxact.watchfire.com/)
•
Cynthia Says
(http://www.cynthiasays.com/)
•
JAWS
(http://www.freedomscientific.com/)
© 2006 Gardner Information Design, Inc.
Conclusion
•
Make the goal to provide people with
disabilities and special access needs as much
information as anyone else.
•
Remove as many barriers to text as possible.
•
Create plain text that can be read by adaptive
technologies.
•
Make your web sites and other electronic
information as text-based as you can.
© 2006 Gardner Information Design, Inc.
Thank You
Visit Boston-IA.org for more information about
accessibility.
– Boston-IA
Bringing Information Architecture and Internet
Accessibility Together
www.Boston-IA.org
– P.J. Gardner
Gardner Information Design, Inc.
www.GIDI.biz
[email protected]
© 2006 Gardner Information Design, Inc.