Lions District 4-C4 - Web Access Resources for Web Masters - Accessibility - Rules of Thumb.


Lionism District Members Activities Calendar Newsletter Resources Links Site Map Contacts Home	Rules of Thumb for Creating an Accessible Web Site For Whom Are You Designing Your Site? Remember, developing your Lions web site is not about YOU. It is an act of service for your community. Therefore, it is about those you serve, their needs and interests. Never loose site of this simple fact. In developing your club or district site, you need to keep three separate objectives in mind. (1) The content of the site should conform to the rules of Lions Clubs International. (2) The site should facilitate the needs and interests of your fellow Lions. (3) Everything on your site should be accessible to the bilind and visually impaired. Who is Developing Your Web Site? Most likely you are relying on a free web service for presentation of basic web pages and a volunteer within your club to develop web page content. Or you may have a more sophisticated volunteer who is creating the site from scratch. If you are using a free service, find out what they offer to make your web pages accessible to the blind and visually impaired. Shop among free services to find the one that best supports accessibility. If you are creating your own web site, build in accessibility from the very beginning. The longer you wait, the more effort will be required. Most aspects of accessibility are not complex or difficult to master. If you are going to use web composition software to create your web site, select the program that best supports web accessibility. Make sure that you understand how to use this component of the software and that others in your club are also comfortable with using such software. If you are relying on volunteers, keep your web site simple. Remember, the next volunteer may not be as technologically knowledgeable as you. What Do the Visually Impaired Need? Typically, the visually impaired suffer from a variety of degenerative conditions such as glaucoma, diabetes, macular degeneration and retenitus pigmentosis. Many of these conditions develop and progress with age, so many older Lions suffer from them. Loss of vision is gradual. Many people try to hang on to their normal life style as long as possible and delay purchasing technological aids. For these folks, your web site should have the following characteristics. Web pages should be designed so that they fill a 14 inch (11 inches wide) monitor set to 800 x 600 pixels. This is a compromise. It provides a sufficiently wide area so that you can design web pages that will not be irritating to sighted people but useful to the visually impaired. Individuals with greater impairment will still need to set their monitor to 640 x 480 pixels, but they will probably be using larger monitors and so will not have to scroll to view the entire width of your web pages. Make certain that your web site works well with the last three versions of both Netscape and Internet Explorer. Different browser versions may interpret the code for the exact same page in very different ways. Your web pages do not need to appear identical in each browser version, but they should look presentable and do the job effectively that they are intended to do. Print size should be large. The size used for text on this page is 2 and it is presented in bold so that it will be relatively easy for a normally sighted person to read. This is because we expect that, as someone who is developing a web site, you can probably cope with this format. Elsewhere on our District web site, we use font size 3 in bold because it is easy on the eyes. We try to make those web pages short so that excessive scrolling is avoided. Use a sanserif font. It is much easier to read. Use the attribute face="Arial,Helvetica" . This gives the browser a choice of nearly identical fonts in the event that one of them is absent from the system. Make sure you use a clean, high contrast presentation wherever information is being imparted. Avoid busy backgrounds. Place print over highly contrasting backgrounds and avoid using the same saturation levels for color pairs, such as red and green, commonly implicated in color blindness. Make your page designs simple, repeat the same design for information that can be presented in the same way, and keep the total number of page designs to a minimum. The visually impaired have to learn where different things are presented on a page and then remember this pattern in case they have to return to the page. The fewer patterns you make them learn and memorize, the friendlier your web site. Make your menus as simple as possible. Your primary menus should be vertical lists of selections because these are easier to track with they eye and remember. We learn from childhood that horizontal printing presents content to be processed at the level of general understanding, while vertical lists consist of independent concepts each of which must be separately understood and remembered. Use this conditioning to your advantage. Make menu icons and other link icons large, with distinct outlines. The visually impaired rely a great deal on outline recognition. Keep the position of icons the same on different pages to make site navigation easier. Limit the use of animated graphics severely. Remember that browsers allow the user to suppress animation, so if you have an animated graphic, make sure that the version (slice) displayed by browsers on which animation is suppressed still carries the message intended for the graphic. If you use animation, be sure that the rendering is relatively slow and smooth so that it can be followed by poor vision. Never use animated or blinking text. If you feel that you must call attention to text by making it blink, introduce a symbol or small graphic next to the text and have that blink. That way, a visually impaired person will be able to read the words you consider so important. Also remember that many visually impaired people who are driven crazy by animated graphics will not know how to disable these using their browsers. When you create your animation, consider limiting the play time to one or two cycles. Use gifs for animation because these can be suppressed by browser settings. Do not use animated gifs because then the browser can't suppress them. What Do the Blind Need? People with extreme visual impairment or full blindness rely on a special software that converts the pages of a web site into sound. This software takes advantage of markup instructions that are undisplayed components of each web page in order to convert the content of the page into spoken words. In order to make a web site accessible to the blind, it is necessary to incorporate these markup insturctions into the HTML (HyperText Markup Language) code that structures each web page. Much of the advice offered in these help pages is concerned with the use of this language. Technical Rules of Thumb Web sites can be created using a wide variety of programming languages and techniques. The simplest of these is HTML (HyperText Markup Language), which is similar to the control codes embeded in Word Perfect text. Other languages, such as XML, can be used and HTML can be used in association with many specialized forms of code, such as CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), Java Scripts, CGI Scripts, and many others. The District 4-C4 web site uses simple HTML and a single, very simple CSS file. Of course, this limits the ways in which we can display information and graphics, and means that I, your faithful web manager, must forego certain bragging rights. However, if you look through the site with a critical eye, I think you will find that it does the job in reasonable fashion. This ASAP (As Simple As Possible) approach is deliberate. We have created our own web site and rely on volunteers for everything. A relative novice can understand and replicate everything you will find on this site.