By Guest Author: David Reynolds, software engineer for over 30 years.
Back in the Eighties, scanning and document recognition was the buzz word. The vision was for all Visually Impaired people to be equipped with scanners and OCR software, and I remember vividly training blind people to read recipe books, album covers, training materials, etc.
Continue reading “Blindness and The Internet = Independence” »
I have had the great pleasure to have had a number of chats with David Reynolds, a blind internet user. He has provided me with some very useful insights as to how website structure, coding and set-up can affect the accessibility of websites to the visually impaired.
Continue reading “Making Accessible Websites” »
Today following my report “Who Wins the Accessibility Election” I received an email from Mark Gale at Mencap who said;
“I was really interested to see your blog onthe accessibility of
political party websites. It was a great article about something I
feel is a key issue in actually engaging with constituents in a clear and transparent way.”
He also said he would mention my report on the Mencap website.
Continue reading “Mencap Like my Accessibility Report” »
Following my article Who Wins the Accessibility Election? I received a call today from David Reynolds who is blind and it was enlightening to talk with him.
Continue reading “Further Accessibility News” »
With regard to website design a part of your considerations when it comes to accessibility should be the text size used on your website – ie is your text really large enough for older people and people with sight disabilities to read, AND is there sufficient differential between the text colour and the background colour to make the text readable. An quick and easy way to check this for your website is to use the online tool at AccessKeys which can be found here.
For accessibility rules see the W3C Accessibility Website
A useful online tool to test to see whether your website is accessible by people with disabilities do try the following. Although the report will cover many of the required criteria some criteria will need to be manually checked however the report will make this clear.