“Can you imagine having to surf the Net without a monitor? What if you could see pages, but couldn't point and click? How would you navigate the Web? For most of us, an inaccessible Web page is one which uses technology not available in our browser. We haven't installed that plug-in, we are using an older version which doesn't support newer technologies, or our brand of browser doesn't support a competitor's technology.”
Doug Adams caught my eye on this consideration to media center websites. With schools that have school websites, if you dig far enough, you will usually find the media center site, each with varying degrees of appeal and usefulness. But what of the special needs students? Adams brings up several points to consider.
Blind and visually impaired people use screen reader software, which translates text on the screen to Braille or spoken words. This software is usually limited to reading from left to right and top to bottom, which works fine for standard text but simply can't handle the complex formatting on many Web pages. Newspaper style columns and tables used for formatting cause problems for screen readers which also cannot translate graphics.
Students with fine motor skills issues don’t have the ability to point and click easily. I think of how many times I sat with my young daughters or my old mother and would say
Are all your media center computers set up for right handed students? All your directions written in
Luckily for us, the standards have been set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). They have created a set of specifications as part of their Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) to help make Web pages accessible to people with disabilities. Located at www.w3.org/TR/WD-WAI-PAGEAUTH, the guidelines cover everything from style and structure to images, audio and video. (Do you provide headsets for the hearing impaired so they can crank up the audio on the computer without disturbing the entire lab?) It is an exhaustive list of guidelines. So they created Bobby. Bobby is a free program designed by the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST), that will check a Web page for accessibility issues and suggest changes needed to make the page W3C/WAI compliant. To use Bobby, type the URL of the Web page to be checked into Bobby's online form (www.cast.org/bobby/). Bobby returns a detailed report of the required (by law) and recommended changes to make the site accessible. It also checks your sites compliancy with all the different varieties of Web browsers. I think the best thing about using Booby is that it will improve the use of the website for all users. Following standards on the Web helps everyone. It ensures that browsers stay compatible and that Web pages remain usable, and most of the recommended changes take only a minute or two to implement. A school or media center with an inaccessible Web page is exactly like a building without wheelchair access or a museum without services for the blind.
For more information on Web accessibility and usability issues, check out the following pages:
All Things Web (www.pantos.org/atw/), which includes a humorous article called "Could Helen Keller Read Your Page?” (www.pantos.org/atw/35412.html)
The Yuri Rubinsky Insight Foundation: WebABLE (www.paciellogroup.com/index.php). Browse this site for other library resources.
Designing a More Usable World (http://trace.wisc.edu/world/web/).
Doug Adams is guru of all information at SCR*TEC, located at University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas.
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