Web accessibility is very often neglected by individuals and companies while creating their web sites. The reason for that mostly is not enough information about the accessibility and its benefits.What people think about accessibility is to provide some description of the images they use and stop using JavaScript and Flash. There is a lot of misunderstanding about web accessibility and its goals. Therefore, I will list 7 scenarios from daily life when people need accessible web sites:
- Users can not see. The text content of the site can be accessed using an assistive technology (screen reader, braille output device but the it can not reproduce an image or a video. The assistive technology can not identify structural elements from pure content. The tables used for layout confuse the screen reader, as it tries to read the content of the table in a manner appropriate for tabular information.
- Users can not hear. They can not access audio content, nor can they follow the narrative in a video clip.
- User can not move. They can not use the mouse nor the keyboard as an user without disabilities can.
- Users can not understand a complex text. They see very long page or too complex sentences. Until they reach the conclusions, they have forgotten the real problem.
- Users have a slow Internet connections and the images either take too long to download or are not downloaded at all.
- Users are not native speakers and have difficulties understanding the foreign language.
- The situation prevents for the user from using their hands, eyes or hears to access a web page. Driving or working in a loud environment are examples.
For more information about the importance of Web Accessibility I recommend the web site of the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative.
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