Too Much Accessibility

Hopefully, anyone subscribed to this blog also follows 456 Berea Street. If not, you missed a great post from Roger Johansson titled Overdoing Accessibility. Go read the article and then subscribe to his feed.

Mike Cherim tackled the same subject awhile back on Avoiding Extreme Accessibility.

Bim Egan ran a whole series of articles titled Too much accessibility – TITLE attributes.

The two attributes that were on all three lists were tabindex and accesskeys. The lesson? Take the time to understand your users, then evaluate the work that you are doing to make sure it is actually helping those you are trying to help.

CSS for Accessibility by Ann McMeekin

Day 13 of 24 Ways brings us CSS for Accessibility by Ann McMeekin. Ann discusses the proper use of line-height for users with dyslexia and how to use the :focus pseudo class to let keyboard users (even those using Internet Explorer) know when they are focused on a link.

Personas of Persons with Disabilities

I recently presented on disability awareness in building accessible websites to a group of interaction designers. At the end, I was asked about examples of a specific person with a disabilities as well as design considerations for that person. This is what I found:

Personas of Persons with Disabilities and Recommended Design Considerations

• Fluid, a user experience project for open source projects, created the persona of Sara Windsor, a faculty member who is blind and outlines some considerations in designing an accessible user experience for her.
• Living with Disabilities, profiles for a blind person, low vision, hearing impaired, motor control impaired, and cognitively challenged, with design considerations for each- from the University of Michigan.

Personas of Persons with Disabilities

• Two personas- Roger Retiree and Kim, College-Student
• Examples for Personas from a Web Accessibility Project (PDF) , featuring Tracy Young representing young people with visual impairments and Gerald Oldman representing old people with disabilities.
• Disabled Personas from JA-SIG including Brent Blindman, Melissa Motorimpaired and Clark Colorblind.
• Unified Modeling Language Actors: “Personas with Disabilities”, I’m not sure what the title means, but this article contains a list of personas and a description of how they were created.
• The WAI has a draft of the personas that they used in their redesign, including a person with a disability

Regardless of whether or not you use personas, the examples are helpful to go through to better understand accessibility from a different perspective, even though that perspective is that of a make believe person.

If the personas aren’t doing it for you, take a gander at some of these videos and experiences to get a better feel for how persons with disabilities access the web:

• AssistiveWare videos on computer accessibility, don’t miss the user profiles of the people in the videos (via Roger Johansson).
• WebAIM Disability Simulations
• Screen reader and screen magnification videos

Additional Resources

• Including Accessibility Considerations in Personas
• Usability: more than skin deep from Lisa Herrod (audio available here)
• How many users with disabilities should you include when conducting a usability test for accessibility?
• Personas on Wikipedia
• From Where I Sit” Video Series, eight students from the California State University discuss their experiences in the college classroom as students with disabilities (via Do-IT Videos page)