how to know weather site is accessible for disabled peoples Options

[usability_guy]

Hi,
Its been a long time since I posted a query here, But I really do enjoy putting myself in this section.
well for better usability we know that the site has to be accessible even for the peoples with certain kind of disabilities, what do we do to achieve that.
* What are the colors we should use basically. or betterway what colors should be avoided.(I am considering mainly the design point of view)
* As my new site is mainly targetted for uk peoples, think it is mandatory that the site should be accessible to one and all (that is a law in uk). Now I already built a prototype, how do I know weather it meets the guidlines for accessibility or not?
* Practically What I did is I had a good look at my homepage from 3-4 feets of distance, then shrink my eyes to 60% and saw weather anything in the page is invisible. I found things are ok!
* may be I am thinking only in terms of eyesight, any other issues?
* using the color #FF8F44 for titles with a small icon before them with trubchet font 18px for titles. and for two really big titles white color and the outline stroke of 3 px of color #4571BA with 60 font size.

So Guys, pl let me know about this.
Lon' time since I heard Kim and where is Braggadicho now a days(infact I am wearing a nice t-shirt today which has all the alphabets on the front side from a to z except the letter u and on the backside says Miss U)

Cheers:
Rams

[bragadocchio]

Nice shirt Rams,

We are around, though definitely keeping busy.

I've come around to thinking that designing for people who might have one type of disabiility or another is designing for everyone these days. The easier you can make it for everyone to enjoy your site, the better for everyone.

There are a lot of very good, and helpful articles and guidelines on the web about accessibilty. Here's one:

http://www.digital-web.com/articles/access...ible_by_design/

I know that there are others out there that go into more depth, but that one might give you some ideas as a start. I'm also seeing a lot of nice posts on accessibility over at the web site accessibility blog:

http://www.accessibilityblog.com/

[Adrian]

*Colours:
You want specific colours? or just guidelines?
There could be problems with pretty much any combination. The first thing to thing about its the level of contrast between foreground and background. That is, can the text be read easily. If the text colour and the background colour are too similar, it can be hard for people to read. Dark text on a light background is generally recommended as the best option. Black text on a white background can actually be TOO much contrast for some people though. In these cases I think pale yellow backgrounds are a good option. Of course, pale yellow doesn't always fit a design
Then you've got various types of colour blindness to deal with, and the different colours the different types affect.

*Accessibility Guidelines:
The DDA doesn't state what classes as being accessible. General concensus is that the WAI guidelines would probably be used to judge whether a site was accessible or not, some think if you meet level A requirements you'd be ok, some think AA. I'd aim for AA personally. You can't automatically check for this, Bobby and Cynthia tests are no good for declaring a site/page A or AA accessible. They can check certain things, but not everything. You need to make informed decisions yourself as to whether you think a page is A/AA/AAA accessible.

*Other issues:
Different types of sight problems, maybe just general poor, maybe near blindness, or total blindness, various other eye problems that can affect how easy it is to use a web site, colour blindness again can be a problem. There are also things like Dyslexia to think about, an mobility problems. Maybe someone doesn't quite have the fine motor skills to click on those small buttons very well? Using larger 'hit' zones can help those kinds of people.

[usability_guy]

Hi,
I got some nice links to share here!

http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly...-internet.shtml

and http://vischeck.com/vischeck/vischeckURL.php

[cre8pc]

Rams,

Answers to usability and user centered design questions are largely dependent on site or application business, functional and end user requirements. Meaning, no one answer is the ultimate "right" answer.

Accessibility research

Run a search on Trenton Moss and read his articles. hint

For color questions, our Graphics section here usually has some good threads. The most important thing to know about color is contrast and readability. Blocks of colored areas are helpful for special needs visitors (helps scan pages).

Sorry to be not as active. I'm here but business is booming (the need for usability testing) and behind the scenes here at the forums, we're getting ready to roll out new things. It's busier here than you may think :wink:

[davidinnotts]

Hi, everyone.

I'm not an expert in this, but my son is and he's been on my back about accessibility for a while.

One key point in making a webpage accessible is to make it readable by the blind - ie, with a text-to-speech program. The key thing here is that the program reads the code from top to bottom, looking for text. This includes ALT-tags. So your BODY should be laid out so that the TtoS reader makes sense for the user.

This is quite a different thing than for sighted people, where with frames and tables and images you can have stuff anywhere in the coding but put it just where you want it to be on the page. So a page which is easy to scan through for the sighted can be a nightmare to navigate for the blind.

Just think - you put your links on the left (but near the end of the code), your images are at the end (but they're crucial for understanding some text and you haven't associated them with the text in the code) and sections which follow each other on the page are in a different order in the script. For a TtoS reader, this will be a nightmare to untangle - so they just don't bother with your site after a couple of tries!

This is a key reason, too, for using sensible ALT-tage on every image - text which makes sense as a part of the whole message for the reader (this includes the text-only user as well as TtoS users.

David.

[usability_guy]

hi guys,
I just got an intresting link here.

http://www.mediaelements.org/index.asp?Typ...d=400&CatId=393

choose the third big icon of " Bruce Lawson" and download the zip file(powerpoint file is a must see)

dload this ppt file (800kb). I donn think we could attach a file here, else i would have done that to minimise your work.

I think it is nice and talks about various disabilities aspects.

Ram