Blind and Visually Impaired Community
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Building websites - so visually impaired visitors can easily use them... (self.Blind)
submitted 8y ago by rendesr
Hello everyone,
I build affiliate websites and niche websites pretty much all the time, and recently have been talking with a client of mine who is visually impaired and the difficulties he can face trying to use tools, sites etc that aren't well designed with accessibility in mind.
It really got me thinking about how I didn't really consider people who had trouble reading websites and those who used screen readers to browse and navigate the web.
Now - of course I know there are web standards for this type of thing and I'm going to be digging deeply into them over the next couple of weeks, but I wanted to ask you guys and gals about more first hand issues and problems that you run into on a day to day basis and what you'd like people who produce websites to consider when building out sites to make *your* browsing easier and more enjoyable.
I plan on writing a huge article about this, highlighting as many of the issues and problems that I'm sure are obvious to you, but might be overlooked by someone not relying on a high contrast setting, or on a screen reader.
Any and all comments really will help me learn more about this, and will allow me to produce a genuinely useful and hopefully outstanding article for web developers to refer to in order to step up their game and make the web much more accessible.
If you prefer to talk privately, feel free to shoot me a private message with your email address and I'll pick up the discussion via email!
Thanks so much in advance,
Steve
I build affiliate websites and niche websites pretty much all the time, and recently have been talking with a client of mine who is visually impaired and the difficulties he can face trying to use tools, sites etc that aren't well designed with accessibility in mind.
It really got me thinking about how I didn't really consider people who had trouble reading websites and those who used screen readers to browse and navigate the web.
Now - of course I know there are web standards for this type of thing and I'm going to be digging deeply into them over the next couple of weeks, but I wanted to ask you guys and gals about more first hand issues and problems that you run into on a day to day basis and what you'd like people who produce websites to consider when building out sites to make *your* browsing easier and more enjoyable.
I plan on writing a huge article about this, highlighting as many of the issues and problems that I'm sure are obvious to you, but might be overlooked by someone not relying on a high contrast setting, or on a screen reader.
Any and all comments really will help me learn more about this, and will allow me to produce a genuinely useful and hopefully outstanding article for web developers to refer to in order to step up their game and make the web much more accessible.
If you prefer to talk privately, feel free to shoot me a private message with your email address and I'll pick up the discussion via email!
Thanks so much in advance,
Steve
fastfinge 3 points
Well, I don't know what kind of websites you build, so I don't know if this applies, but the biggest frustration I find regularly is a lack of consistency throughout a website. As far as I know (and I could be wrong), standards documents don't really address this. The problem is especially bad on sites that allow users to style things, like MySpace and Zanga used to, back in the day. You can wind up with some parts of a website that are perfectly accessible, and some that aren't, depending on who's in charge. Wordpress.com for example, is pretty bad for this. They host all the wordpress installs everyone who blogs at domain.wordpress.com uses, so there is no reason they can't let me sign in with my Wordpress.com account, and then force every wordpress.com blog I view to use a theme of my choice. That way, they'd all look the same, and be more-or-less accessible! Tumblr is another website that's bad for this; I haven't tried tumblr in over a year, but last I checked, even when I signed in, I couldn't disable the customized styles for each different tumblr. If that's changed and I'm wrong, I'd love to know! In the positive category, Reddit does this perfectly; when I'm signed in, I can disable subreddit styles, if I don't want them. DreamWidth and other LiveJournal based sites also do this well; I can force every other journal I visit to use the style I have for my journal.
TL;DR: If you let users who post content to your website customize the look and theme of their section of the site, provide a way for blind users to disable these custom themes, and use your *hopefully* fully accessible global style.
TL;DR: If you let users who post content to your website customize the look and theme of their section of the site, provide a way for blind users to disable these custom themes, and use your *hopefully* fully accessible global style.
rendesr [OP] 1 points
Thanks very much for your detailed reply - appreciated!
Do you use a regular browser (like Chrome, FireFox etc) or do you sometimes use a text only browser like Lynx?
Do you use a regular browser (like Chrome, FireFox etc) or do you sometimes use a text only browser like Lynx?
fastfinge 2 points
I use Firefox on my Windows 7 laptop, and Safari on mac.
Most blind people don't use command line anymore, so I don't really know of anyone who still uses Lynx or any other text based browser. These days, with sites like YouTube and SoundCloud, audio is a large enough part of the browsing experience that it wouldn't make sense.
Most blind people don't use command line anymore, so I don't really know of anyone who still uses Lynx or any other text based browser. These days, with sites like YouTube and SoundCloud, audio is a large enough part of the browsing experience that it wouldn't make sense.
rendesr [OP] 1 points
Thanks again, one thing I stumbled across was the Speak Your Word project, which basically promoted the use of dual format article/blog posts so there is an audio 'reading' for people to listen to.
From their twitter: "Initiative to motivate bloggers for recording their articles into narration in order to offer the blind community the chance of information in a personal format"
Would something like that add value to your browsing experience?
From their twitter: "Initiative to motivate bloggers for recording their articles into narration in order to offer the blind community the chance of information in a personal format"
Would something like that add value to your browsing experience?
fastfinge 2 points
Edit: The average human speaks at 150 words per minute, not 50 words per minute. I knew this, but my finger just didn't wanna hit that "1" key, apparently.
Personally, no. I have my TTS set to well over 300 words per minute, and the average human speaks at 150 words per minute. Sure, for fiction books and stories, I love audio readings by a real human, because they can dramatize the fiction in a way a computer never will. But for the vast majority of the blog posts I read, a human reading would add no value. I can honestly think of only 2 of the 20 or 30 blogs I read regularly that I'd enjoy having read to me. For the rest of them, I'd use my TTS even if I had the option of a human reader. TTS is faster, and if the article has been well-organized (headings, etc), I can skip the uninteresting bits.
Also, every single blog I read includes multiple images in the articles with no alt-text, or where the only thing in the alt-text is photo credits (stockphoto/Wavecraft Media is not valid alt-text, no matter that it passes all the tests, and fulfills your obligations to give photo credits). I'm absolutely serious about this, without any exaggeration at all:, every single blog I read has photos with no alt-text or invalid alt-text. So trying to get bloggers to read their articles out loud is just a tragic waste of resources, that could be better spent advocating about alt-text. If you use an image, for anything, it needs a description. Who cares if you take the 25 minutes required to record a reading of your article, if you flatly refuse to take the 45 seconds needed to describe an image you included.
Personally, no. I have my TTS set to well over 300 words per minute, and the average human speaks at 150 words per minute. Sure, for fiction books and stories, I love audio readings by a real human, because they can dramatize the fiction in a way a computer never will. But for the vast majority of the blog posts I read, a human reading would add no value. I can honestly think of only 2 of the 20 or 30 blogs I read regularly that I'd enjoy having read to me. For the rest of them, I'd use my TTS even if I had the option of a human reader. TTS is faster, and if the article has been well-organized (headings, etc), I can skip the uninteresting bits.
Also, every single blog I read includes multiple images in the articles with no alt-text, or where the only thing in the alt-text is photo credits (stockphoto/Wavecraft Media is not valid alt-text, no matter that it passes all the tests, and fulfills your obligations to give photo credits). I'm absolutely serious about this, without any exaggeration at all:, every single blog I read has photos with no alt-text or invalid alt-text. So trying to get bloggers to read their articles out loud is just a tragic waste of resources, that could be better spent advocating about alt-text. If you use an image, for anything, it needs a description. Who cares if you take the 25 minutes required to record a reading of your article, if you flatly refuse to take the 45 seconds needed to describe an image you included.
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