Category Archives: Web Accessibility

This post is the second of a series entitled “Ten points to accessible Information”.

Knowledge about your audience is communications 101 so focusing on the intended audience for information may seem like stating the obvious.  Yet web sites in particular often seem to be more “about us” than about the user’s experience.

Who is this information for? How will they use it? One size no longer fits all. Identifying different audiences may seem relatively straightforward, but there are some audiences who may not routinely spring to mind. Disabled people, older people, people who have difficulty with reading and people who have English as a second language may have particular information and communication needs.

To help you decide you need to ask: Is your audience large and general or small and specialist? Try to avoid making assumptions about who will be interested in your information. Disabled people may be present in all sections of the population. Accessible information is therefore best thought of as business as usual to reach a general audience.

As a rough guide, some examples of the kinds of information intended for the general public which should be accessible are; weather or travel information, information about health, disaster preparedness, event booking services, supermarket specials, jobs, road safety and community campaigns such as quitting smoking or family violence programmes. In short, pretty much the same information as everyone else.

Disabled people may also be within a particular audience, such as young people, who will want to know about the same topics young people generally are interested in, such as sexual health, forming healthy relationships, fashion and gossip, sport, or the latest music gigs.

Where information may have a significant impact on disabled people or on a particular group of disabled people, extra attention should be paid to accessibility. A variety of formats may be necessary to reach the whole disability community, or particular formats for a particular group.

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When I look back over my posts I realise that I have written quite a lot about accessible information, but never described what I mean by the term or expanded on the people who need it. So here goes.

Of course everyone needs accessible information.  But there are groups of people who encounter particular barriers when accessing information.

Information is accessible when it is readily available to diverse audiences in ways which they can understand and use. It is presented in a range of formats and styles to people who are print-disabled. They may or may not use a range of specialist technologies.

Print-disabled people are those who are; blind, or have low vision, or who have dyslexia or other related impairments. They may be hearing impaired or Deaf. People who physically can’t hold a book or paper, or who have difficulties processing the written word are also print-disabled.

Others may have poor education for a variety of reasons. They may have learning disabilities, brain injury, dementia or short attention span and/or memory or other mental health problems. People on particular medication may find concentrating on print difficult. They may have one or a combination of several impairments.

People with poor literacy or people who do not have English as their first language may also welcome many aspects of accessible information, as long as it is not stigmatised,

Now that I have given some context to accessible information, I will focus on some of the basics in future blogs.

Making your organisation’s information accessible to everyone needs thought and planning. An accessible web site is always a great start, but that could be part of a more effective wider communications strategy relating closely to organisational goals and purpose.

Accessible information needs to be:

• User focused
• Relevant
• Timely
• Concise
• Understandable
• Portable
• Perceivable
• Acceptable
• Tested
• Available

Each of these points will be developed and explored in future posts.

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In a city where you can and frequently do have all four seasons in eight hours the weather web site is regular viewing for those of us who can’t drive and therefore walk to work (and most other places.) We need to make critical decisions like: head to toe raincoat with hood or windproof jacket and woolly hat and scarf,  shoes, sandals or weather proof boots, sunnies or not. And that’s just the outerwear.

Then there’s the issue if whether or not you need your merino vest and long johns.

I am not talking about mid winter either. A few days ago I sat next to a young woman on the bus who was wearing woolly gloves! I was envious of her comfort.

The Terrace, where I live and work in Wellington is a wind tunnel, and since it is almost always a southerly or northerly here the decision on wearing dangling or stud earrings may have health and safety consequences.

That’s why I was interested to try the beta version, now live, of the Metservice web site, where I am a regular visitor. The old site left a great deal to be desired in terms of accessibility. Sadly, although there are some improvements, so does the new.

I gave feedback as invited. I even phoned them. The person I spoke to had obviously never heard of web standards or accessibility, and admitted they were not included in the design brief.

Accessibility issues are not being addressed according to the feedback blog post, except they took down or renamed the page called About Accessibility which had information about different browsers but did not mention accessibility or have any content relevant to accessibility.

A few quick observations:

• The new site is still quite busy and cluttered. You need good hand eye coordination to read the ten day forecast on the city page.
• I suspect it won’t work well without broadband.
• Some features seem to rely on mouse hovering only.
• While the site enlarges reasonably I lose information on the right hand side of the page at a certain point. On further investigation I discovered that the information is the weather warnings!
• There is no accessibility statement.
• And the text is grey, which means I have to enlarge it more to make it readable. Grey text is pretty but unreadable, especially on the blog.
• Colour Contrast on the maps is also not good.

Why is it that sites which provide important and most useful public information are sometimes the least willing to do it properly? If people are finding the site difficult to use I suggest they ring Metservice and ask them to read the information they want from the site to them, or email them and ask for a plain test version of the information they need. It might be the only way to get the message across.

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