Sprogformidling
New page: About this site
To conform with what seems to be an international tendency, www.thau-knudsen.dk has also a page about this site. Now, an English version is available.
I just read a book called Handicap friendly web design — accessible web pages [Handicapvenligt webdesign — tilgængelige websider], and it inspired me to make an About this site page. The page itself states ownership, design ideas, and accessibility.
Some years ago I had the greatest respect to handicap technologies. Imagine all the material benefits they brought about to the rest of us: escalators, spectacles, scooters, lifts, coins in different sizes. And then the immaterial ones such as sign systems (braille, deaf sign language), which lay the foundations for semiology and consequently computer programming, as well as a deeper understanding about dialectology and sociolinguistics. However, with the current pace of the scienctific-technological revolution, physical handicaps don't appear to inspire the engineers as much as general human lazyness.
Web technologies are an exception. Forcing the web designers (in the broadest sense of this signification) to make pages accessible to people with disabilities usually end up in better design for all.
Despite the good intentions, not all sites with a declared accessibility policy live up to it. My best example is EUROPA — Web Accessibility Policy by the European Union. It introduces the page with the following beautiful statement:
Through various research programmes, the European Commission has been addressing the needs and requirements of people with disabilities and financing different web accessibility projects for over ten years.
One of the projects financially supported by the European Commission is the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) project, which contributes to promoting and developing guidelines and recommendations for web access for all.
It has the following bad design:
- You can't navigate using the keyboard only *).
- The page is laid out using tables instead of divisions.
- The chief table has no summary.
- There are fixed sizes on many elements.
- Links have no explanation, and the linking text is not exhaustive for the link.
- Not written in XHTML.
It does have some refinements such as skip menu and choices for non-JavaScript browsers, but this is not essential for a blind person.
The new page may be subdivided into several pages at a later stage.
Erik Thau-Knudsen
Note
*) 2006-06-29: Problems with keyboard navigation/browsing appears to be a browser specific problem; positive results with the official web site of the European Commission are gained with Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Seamonkey, Safari. Negative results: Opera. Screen browsers that cannot jump from link to link using the tabulator key: Camino, iCab, old browsers (Safari pre-2, Netscape Navigator for the Mac pre-6, Internet Explorer for the Mac pre-4.5). I am thankful to my friend Morten Simonsen, Denmark, who turned my attention to this issue. Back to bad design list.
