Wolverhampton City Learning Centre (CLC)

One of the more time-consuming projects we’ve been involved in recently is the development of new websites for two of our partner primary schools. A website design service was offered to the CLC contacts and was rapidly snapped up by both Green Acres Primary School and Bushbury Hill Primary School. The site for Bushbury Hill is now complete at www.bushburyhillprimary.org.uk; the site for Green Acres is nearing completion.

I’ve been developing websites for education for some time now, but these new sites are the first I’ve worked on where I’ve paid full attention to one of the “hot topics” of web design at the moment - web accessibility.

So what is web accessibility? Web accessibility means that “people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Web” (http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/accessibility.php). Visitors with disabilities have as much right to access the information on the Internet as anybody else. It is therefore the responsibility of web-designers to create webpages that are accessible to these visitors.

Accessible websites are well-structured. They have a clear distinction between the navigational zones of the design and content. Links are clear. The organisation of pages and the relationships between them is immediately obvious. It is easy to find your way to the homepage of the site.

I hope that all of my previous sites meet these criteria. However, some of the key elements of a truly accessible site may not be immediately obvious to non-disabled visitors surfing the web using the traditional medium of a PC/Mac, web browser (e.g. Internet Explorer) and mouse.

How do different groups of disabled visitors navigate around the Web?

• Visitors with sight difficulties may surf the Web with screen-reading software that reads webpages to them using a synthesized voice.
• Visitors with motor difficulties may be unable to use a mouse to point-and click.

How do we make sites accessible to these visitors? One easy way to get a handle on how different groups of visitors may perceive our sites is to download the Web Accessibility toolbar for Internet Explorer. (visit http://www.visionaustralia.org.au/info.aspx?page=614). The toolbar gives easy access to a large number of simulations and reports on your (or anyone else’s website) Want to know how your site appears to someone who is colour-blind? Or how it would appear in a text-only browser (a good indication of how it would sound using screen-reading software too). Want to know how long a page will take to download over a slow connection? All of this information is available immediately from the toolbar.

The two key changes I’ve made to the new sites I’m developing are:

• The coding of access keys for each of the main site sections. An accesskey allows visitors to follow a link by pressing the ALT key and a letter or number (the CTRL key is used on a Mac). So, for example, I might assign the C key to take a visitor to the Community section. A press of ALT-C (then the enter key in Internet Explorer) would take visitors to the Community section. For people who struggle to use a mouse, this gives immediate access to links. Note that there are UK guidelines for the assigning of standard accesskeys to common site components like the home page, contact page, sitemap: see http://www.opsi.gov.uk/about/accessibility.htm for a list of these standard keys.
• The coding of tab index values, so that if a visitor is tabbing through the links on a page, they cycle through in a logical order.

A look around school websites leads me to believe that the vast majority of them are not accessible to disabled visitors. Web Accessibility now forms part of the Disability Discrimination Act, so in theory at least, organisations are at risk of legal action if their websites do not meet the needs of their visitors. I don’t anticipate that this will happen to schools any time soon; Disabled Support Groups are set to target much larger, commercial organisations first. Nevertheless, web accessibility is really an ethical issue; disabled visitors have as much right to access the information we publish to the web as anyone else, and designers should seek to facilitate their access as best we can.

If any Wolverhampton school wants help or advice in implementing these ideas, please contact the CLC on 01902 551509.