Rachel Earley | Web Designer/Developer based in Dublin

Last Friday was great day. It was my first experience of the FOWA event held by the good folks at Carsonified. I had been hugely looking forward to it and was not dissapointed with some fantastic speakers. David Heinemeier Hansson from 37 Signals was the big draw and he didn’t dissapoint with a typically enthusiastic talk on setting up your own Web App or Web Company. It was pretty inspirational left me feeling fierce productive and driven! Other standout speakers for were the boys from Contrast, Eoghan and Des, who gave a rollercoaster humourous but insiteful talk on Unconvential Web Apps. Simon Willison also created a great buzz and struck fear into the minds of all developers out there with a talk of Web App Horror stories. My favourite being the Sammy Worm. Very funny.

Accessibility

When it came to the crunch though, the speaker that made the most impression on me was Robin Christopherson from Abilitynet. He spoke of Accessibility in Web Apps and its importance in the design and build of websites. He is a leader in his field and has made a career out of it by being one of the founder members of AbilityNet. The difference is that Robin is blind. A fact that made his talk all the more interesting.

We all aim to be as accessibilty friendly when building sites and indeed I have been involved in some builds where it was paramount and we followed all the rules and aimed to make the site as accessible as possible. However, you can never really know unless you have a need for the benefits that these accessibilty tools can bring. This is why Robin’s talk was fascintating. He was using screenreaders throughout his talk and showed us a number of examples of sites where bad acccessibilty coding meant disaster for those with visual or hearing imparments trying to use the site. The importance of the simple “alt” tag took on a whole new importance! The layout of the site is paramount in terms of headers, structure, nav etc. Screen readers read in a linear manner so reading a site can take so much longer. Watching Robin navigate the site with a screenreader seemed like such a frustrating way to browse a website and bad accessiblity coding only added to that. It really brought home the absolute neccessity of making accessiblity a primary element in the design process.

Here’s some of the more intersting tips he gave us:

• Playing video on your site - try to avoid Autostart. The reason being is that the audio will interfere with the screenreader and the user needs time to hear the screen reader , even just to find out where the stop and play buttons are on the video player!
• Be careful of the type of videos you play on your site and watch them for flashing in terms of the effects on people with epilepsy. There are some tools out there that can measure videos
• Have you catered for those with Javascript turned off? Fixmystreet.com is an excellent example where users with JS turned off can still utilise the service in an accessible manner.
• Be careful with your css and html build, what happens if the user increases the size of the font? Check the Number10 website to see how it can all go horribly wrong

All these things can seem like a time consuming part of building your site or App. However, what’s the use of having a beautifully designed site, it may look great but for people like Robin who are more interested in your content, yet you’ve neglected even the basic elements of accessible coding, he’ll disgard your site immediately because its just too frustrating!

*If its all a bit daunting, start here: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/