Disabilities and Specific Needs?

[Bradley316]

I have a question. When designing pages for a client, does anyone consider disabled users? I've read that it will soon be possible for disabled people to sue an organisation if they do not provide access that is equal to their regular provision.

With big projects, such as college or government sites, it would be impossible to manually produce and update text only alternatives, does anyone know of a solution?

[RazoRmedia]

Originally posted by Bradley316
With big projects, such as college or government sites, it would be impossible to manually produce and update text only alternatives, does anyone know of a solution?

simply use alt tags on all your images (including large spacers). This will make text only browsers 'see' your images. This is especially important for title images and headlines.

You should be doing this anyway for large sites to aid in search engine optimisation.

[TianaKaeSha]

A lot of people are also doing this with flash. Adding in closed captions that can be hidden if you do not want them - as well as having streaming comentary for them. for text only browsers and site readers, being sensitive to the ways these work is a must.

Macromedia is doing a lot about usability at the moment. I went to a conference by them for this issue and it was very cool.

worth looking at their site for some more info.

[le_saut]

Macromedia is doing some good accessibility stuff with MX, a look at the online Macromedia AS dictionary -

http://www.macromedia.com/support/fl...48.html#238117

http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia...ssibility.html

Accessibility can be instigated in many ways -

• *alt tags for graphical text
  *user defined text size (this can be easily accomplished with CSS).
  *being aware of the various types of colour blindness.

etc etc

regards

James

[askari]

There are actually heaps of requirements for access to web sites for people with disabilites... too numerous to mention here. Run some code through the Bobby validator and you will soon find out!

If you have some spare time check out...

http://www.cast.org/bobby/
http://www.w3.org/

A few people have mentioned alt tags but its not often that you see people use them properly. You have to actually describe how the graphic image looks as well as any copy that is in the image.