Web Design and Accessibility
The Guardian Online has a good column today on
web design and accessibility. Their columnist, Jack Schofield, contends that:
Very few government and commercial websites are adequately usable by the partially sighted and blind, or offer an equivalent service to disabled users. That is simply not acceptable on social grounds. It is also, as a matter of fact, a betrayal of the principles of the web.
Schofield blames this on what he calls "designers with keyboards" - people who come out of the graphics and arts fields with no training in or feeling for the internet. He suggests that some of them should be thrown in jail, but the U.K.'s Royal National institute of the Blind is taking a more realistic approach by backing individuals who are taking legal action against websites that they claim violate England's accessibility legislation.
Schofield goes on:
Universal access is not a happy accident: it is what the web is for.
Unfortunately, we have hired a generation of web designers who don't know anything about computing, or the principles on which the web is based, or the reasons for its success. In fact, most of them are not web designers at all: they are graphic designers, or print designers, who have strayed into an area they don't understand. They are just painters and decorators with keyboards.
While I agree with his argument, I think he goes too far here. It is my experience working with web designers that very many of them do understand the web. There's a new generation of web designers who have received their education in web design, who have been brought up on the web, and are seriously committed to the principles of accessibility, good design and usability. They are rapidly replacing the designers who caused such eye-candy blight in the gold rush days of the late 1990s. There's hope for the web yet.
W3C's
Web Accessibility Initiative is a good place for background on this issue.
Posted by wetcoast at July 19, 2003 03:10 PM