I was listening to a recent episode of Hanselminutes where Scott Hanselman was discussing accessibility in web applications and it got me thinking about accessibility in my own applications.
We all understand the importance of semantic markup in our web applications as it relates to accessibility but what about other simple enhancements that can be made to improve the user experience for disabled users?
In the episode, there were a number of times where I slapped my forehead and said ‘Of course! Why haven’t I done that?’ In particular, Scott talked about a website that placed a hidden link at the top of a web page that said ‘skip to main content’. The link will only be visible to people using screen readers and it allows their screen reader to jump past menus and other secondary content. It’s such an obvious improvement yet it’s easy not to think of it.
There is more to accessibility and the overall user experience than simply creating valid XHTML and calling it a day.
What are some of your simple tricks for improving the user experience for the vision impaired?
Check out Fangs
Fangs is an in-browser tool for Firefox that emulates what a screen reader “sees” when visiting a Web page. Its function is simple: to output a transcript of what a screen reader will read out to a user when a Web page is visited. It’s a helpful tool for quickly analyzing if you’ve structured your content effectively so that it’s understandable and usable by vision-impaired individuals, without forcing you to learn to use (and purchase) a screen-reader application such as JAWS or Windows Eyes.