Accesibility

Reasons to be standard compliant

• Web usage is spreading quickly in every area of society.
• There are barriers for many types of disabilities.
• Millions of people have disabilities that affect their Web access (10% to 20% of population have disabilities in most countries).
• The average age of population in many countries is increasing (problem with vision, hearing, skills and memory).

Types of disabilities

• Visual disabilities: blind people who use voice browsers, or either people with colour-blindness, cataracts, reduced contrast, low vision, etc. When Web browsing they are affected by images without alternative texts, videos without description, tables and frames not properly marked, not being able of increasing the text size.
• Hearing disabilities: deaf people or with hearing problems. When browsing the Web they are affected by the lack of audio tags: subtitles, audio files transcriptions.
• Physical disabilities: people with Parkinson's disease, with injured arms, hand shaking, involuntary movements, paralysis, etc. When Web browsing they are affected if pages don't support key alternatives: access to menus using commands, forms without order in the data enter fields, time restriction when entering information.
• Cognitive disabilities: people with attention problems, dyslexia, lack of memory. When Web browsing they find problems with visual or audio elements that can't be deactivated, lack of graphics to support the writing language, lack of organization in the content structure, fixed text size.
• Technological disability: people who navigate with MODEM or old computers, slow connections, old browsers or that they can't interpret properly the content. They are affected by designs that don't adapt to low resolution screens, if pages cannot be displayed without stylesheets or images, screens that only display text.

What else should I do if you build my accessible website?

For static web pages, the company doesn't need to do anything else; however, if the web page has content managers, the content will need to comply with a minimum requirements.

How can accessible content be entered?

With basic knowledge skills in computers, you will learn to use the content managers using any standard Internet browser. Web pages can be updated by accessing a private space. Using web forms you will be able to edit, delete or introduce content in pages. This forms have a toolbar similar to Word, but with the added feature of being able to insert accessible content easily. The features that should have the inserted content are: image description, show language change, subtitle videos, transcribe videos, titles in links, structure information with titles and subtitles.

The following is a screenshot of a form with format bar. Content is inserted in the box and can be edited with the bar, apart from format bold text, italics, insert images, etc. compliant with accessibility standards.

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