Re: So you think your site is easy to navigate?? Try this .....

A Men Brother!  I am a JAWS user and you have hit on every point I have run across!  Spot on! and
Good on you!
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Kear" <choicemag(at)hotmail.com>
To: <hwg-techniques(at)hwg.org>
Sent: Sunday, June 03, 2001 11:39 PM
Subject: So you think your site is easy to navigate?? Try this .....


I have just come out of a most enlightening session with a blind user,
running though a client's web site with JAWS, a screen reading program that
turns the web page into synthesised voice.

I thought I was quite aware of accessibility issues before, and was
comfortable in thinking that my sites were better than the average in
providing access to the blind and people with other disabilities.  This
session was educational to say the least.

I am still convinced my sites are better than average, but I am bound to
inform you that the average is pretty damn poor.   I know some people are
really concerned about accessibility for the disabled and others have
decided that the disabled are such a small portion of their userbase, it's
not worth changing everything to allow for them.

I'm here to tell you that it's not difficult to design a good site to allow
for access, it just takes a little understanding of how programs like JAWS
works.   To be truthful, I think that if I were blind, I'd go stark raving
mad at all the frustrations of life but trying to surf the web wouldn't make
life any easier that's for sure.

For example, he took us through a page of our bookshop.   And we'd arranged
things to look nice on the page, but there were parts of the catalogue page
where he didn't know what the "add to basket" graphic was referring to -
this book or the previous one.   And some nested tables were simply awful
and impossible to work round.    We all think putting navigation buttons on
the top of every page makes for easy navigation, but blind people have to
wade through (in our case) 50 navigation links before getting to the guts of
the page.  On a search of our site, the resulting page has a nice header at
the top with links to all our site's catgegories and sub-categories and then
a sidebar with links to other parts of the site, and finally the search
results itself.  Visually it looks fine - quick and simple to move around
the site.  But using the screen reading software it took **AGES** to get to
anything related to the search.  By just laying out the page differently, we
could have made this page FAR easier to navigate for him.

I'm not suggesting we should all go about redesigning our sites just for the
relatively few blind users, but just understanding how the software works,
has made me re-think many of the forms I build.   The user also said that
Government sites tended to be the worst of all.  I'm not sure if that's
because they're designed by developers with an eye on the government money
or because they are specified by bureaucrats.  Certainly of all the sites
that ought to know about accessibility, Government sites ought to be the
leaders, and apparently they aren't.


I think as web developers, you'd all be doing A Good Thing if you arranged
for a meeting like we just had at Australian Consumers Association - have a
blind person come and work your site for you using their screen reading
software.  At the risk of being accused of making an off-colour joke, it's a
real eye-opener.


Cheers,
Mike Kear
AFP Webworks,
Windsor, NSW, Australia.

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